The Case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study | | This essay examines the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, wherein for 40 years (1932-1972) hundreds of black men suffering from advanced syphilis were studied but not treated. The 40-year study was controversial for reasons related to ethical standards; primarily because researchers knowingly failed to treat patients appropriately after the 1940s validation of penicillin as an effective cure for the disease they were studying. To explore the role of the racism in the controversial study, this essay analyzes the article written by Allan M. Brandt. | |

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (also known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or Public Health Service Syphilis Study) was an infamous clinical
By not doing so and allowing this study to go on for forty years, this has become one of the most unethical and inhumane events in the United States. The risk to the patients in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was death, and no amount of scientific data was worth the lives of hundreds of men.
There is no doubt that this study was unethical and inhumane, but I do not agree that it was racial. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was conducted with subjects who were all African American. This can lead to the belief that the researchers were racist and used African Americans because their lives had less worth than white individuals. These are very valid realizations that could possibly be true but what is interesting is the use of African Americans for recruiting and also African Americans helping to conduct the study. The PHS even expressed that by using African American physicians they could more easily gain the cooperation from the African American studies. If this was a racist study why would African Americans support a study that devalued their own race?
Another ironic fact about racism within the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was that the title of the study itself came from the Tuskegee Institute which was a black university that was founded by Booker T. Washington. When recruiting subjects, leaders within the black community were used to gain the confidence and trust of the men used in the study. For a study that is believed to be so racist, it is