The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Medical Ethics & Race

Disability Series, #4 of 4. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was an ethically problematic, to say the least, medical research project conducted in Alabama. Officially titled “The Effects of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” this government-sponsored research project was conducted by the United States Public Health Service in Macon County, Alabama, between 1932 and 1972. For four decades, researchers observed the progression of untreated syphilis in approximately 399 African American men without their informed consent. Many of the men thought they were being treated for “bad blood,” which had a variety of connotations. They were not aware that they were being actively blocked from receiving effective treatment, even after penicillin became the recognized standard of care for syphilis in the 1940s. Rather than viewing the study as an isolated event, we’ll see how the Tuskegee study fits into a broader framework of American medical and disability history and racial discrimination. 

Select Bibliography

Jones, James H. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. (Simon and Schuster, 1993). 

Lederer, Susan. “Experimentation on Human Beings.” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 19, No. 5, Medicine and History (Sep., 2005), pp. 20-22.

Reverby,  Susan Mokotoff. Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy. (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 

Sharma, Alankaar. “Diseased Race, Racialized Disease: The Story of the Negro Project of American Social Hygiene Association Against the Backdrop of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.” Journal of African American Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 247-262. 

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