Best of the Storytelling Contest
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Campus
Originally published in Synapse on January 20, 1994.
The 40-year study of untreated syphilis in black men at the Tuskegee Institute, a project which has received extensive moral condemnation and has irrevocably destroyed the faith of many in the American medical system, has taken on a renewed significance in light of current revelations concerning experiments exploring human exposure to radiation during the Cold War.
In a Jan. 12 talk at UCSF, Peter Buxton, the man whose efforts brought the Tuskegee study to national attention, explained its evolution and final unraveling.
Tuskegee, which is the county seat of Macon, Alabama, shared the impoverished and undeveloped characteristics of much of the rural South at the turn of the century.
Its population consisted primarily of black sharecroppers, most of whom lived in ramshackle huts, were malnourished, and were frequency infected with malaria and parasitic worms.
The preponderance of impure water and the sharecroppers’ almost complete lack of medical resources made the spread of disease common.
In addition, much of the black population was illiterate and uneducated, due to Alabama’s minuscule educational expenditures.
In 1930 the National Health Service initiated a program to use the Wassermann syphilis antibody test to detect the syphilis spirochete, and to treat infected subjects with salversan, considered the “magic bullet” which...
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