Essay On Tuskegee Syphilis

When Christopher Columbus landed on the island of Hispañola in 1492, and brought the news of rich new lands to the west back to Spain, the European powers have fought for and brutalized the people living on the land they wanted to reap. Academic classes of that period’s history make sure never to forget to teach that old world European diseases swept through the Americas like a flash fire. And, when pathology and epidemiology became relatively understood in Europe, settlers and military units in North America, the Caribbean, and South America used their innate disease immunity to propagate the deadliest of diseases on to the vulnerable natives.

The most notable use of this tactic was used on the American frontier in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. In order to quell American Indian raids and
revolts during a treaty’s “peacetime,” American, British, and French soldiers would give out blankets covered in the smallpox virus in an effort to infect the native threat. As one could deduce, through the use of military might and disease spread, native threats were soon removed and the strong Americans, or should I say white people, could turn their weapon of disease onto other raced deemed “unfit” or “lower on the hierarchical scale” than whites.

Several medical and political actions taken in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries lead to the partially true accusation of white people using people of other races to demean through medical testing.
Cases such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the leper colony in Hawaii, and even actions within the Japanese American Internment camps during World War II come to mind. The Tuskegee syphilis experiments were conducted in rural southern Alabama in from the early 1930s to as late as the mid 1970s; physicians from the United States Public Health Service studied the effects of untreated syphilis on the human cardiovascular and nervous systems, and instead of using a variant pool of diverse infected individuals, they used impoverished black male sharecroppers – from southern Alabama, where black children were practically “born with syphilis” – promising them treatment if they could do physical examinations. Even though penicillin became available as a potent treatment for venereal diseases in the 1950s, those conducting the study advocated on the current course of action, which included the unnecessary and preventable deaths of those black men at the hands of
syphilis.

Similarly, in the early twentieth century, leprosy was an almost incurable and notoriously infectious disease. Individuals with the disease were sent from every corner of the United States to the island of Molokai, Hawaii to the leper colony Kalaupapa, despite their sex or race. Though the colony was more “equal opportunity” in accepting those with the disease, those in charge of the colony made no efforts to aid or treat those afflicted. The same goes for those wrongfully interred in the Japanese American internment camps in the American southwest. While as a way to prevent another in house Japanese attack on American soil during World War II, the government doctors assigned to the camps took no action to prevent or treat the diseases that became widespread throughout the population.