On February 17, 2019, epidemiologist and whistleblower Bill Jenkins died in Charleston, South Carolina at age 73. This Black History Month, we remember his contributions in the field of healthcare whistleblowing.
As a recent college graduate, Jenkins was “one of the first African Americans recruited to the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.” One of his early activities calling out racism and discrimination was publishing the anti-discrimination newsletter the Drum. The Drum soon became a forum for circulating the discovery of the unethical Tuskegee experiment. Through his work with the Public Health Service (PHS), Jenkins found out about the PHS studying—but not treating—Black men infected with syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama since 1932. While medical journals described study participants as “volunteers,” the participants were in fact not informed of the deadliness of the disease nor the available penicillin treatments. Of the original approximately 300 “participants,” only 74 remained when the study was finally exposed and ended, with most having died from complications due to the otherwise treatable disease.
While Jenkins’ and others’ efforts in the Drum did not stop the Tuskegee experiment in the late 1960s, by 1972, a former investigator with the Public Health Service looped in the press. The study made front page news, leading to its end. Along with two other unethical medical experiments from the mid twentieth century, the Tuskegee experiment was “credited...
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