The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

Tuskegee Syphilis Study The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was a dark period of time in the United States for medical research. This study was started back in 1932 under the direction of the U.S. Department of Public Health. Two years before the Tuskegee study began, a program was initiated by the PHS (Public Health Service) to diagnose and treat 10,000 African Americans for syphilis is Macon County, Alabama (Munson, p.417). To put the prevalence of syphilis in perspective, “Sampling showed that thirty-five percent of the black population in Macon County was infected with syphilis.” (Munson, p. 417) But, this program was cut short due to the loss of funding. Sometime after this, around 1932, Dr. Taliaferro Clark of the PHS salvaged what he could
Raymond Vonderlehr, who was a PHS officer, was the man granted with the ability to continue leading the study. (Munson, p.418) The patients, who did not know about their disease status, treatment, or availability of other treatments (penicillin), were still being subjected to the study. The PHS found this to be okay, because the significance of the results that were being founded. These results disproved the pervious opinion that blacks tolerated syphilis better than whites. With this new finding, the PHS wanted to continue discovering how syphilis developed and the signs and symptoms associated. In the movie “Miss Evers’ Boys”, Nurse Evers’ (fictionalized off of the historical nurse, Nurse Rivers) had known about the treatment of penicillin (penicillin was discovered as an effective treatment in the early 1940’s). But, she was not allowed to tell the patients about this because the PHS wanted to continue gathering data and information on the syphilis
I would not have been able to go around recruiting hundreds of poor, un-educated, black males knowing what the study entails. On top of that I would not be able to hold all their medical information in my hands and simply go around and tell them vaguely that they have “bad blood”. I agree with Kantian ethics in the fact that regardless of the consequences lying is always wrong. Going off of that I would have looked at everything behind the veil of ignorance. This is part of Rawl’s Theory of Justice. The veil of ignorance says that each person is unaware of sex, race, natural endowments, social position, and economic position. This is how I would have looked at every candidate who participated in the study. Instead, the PHS had the impression, “That the people were all rural, impoverished, and poorly educated black males makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the PHS regarded the subjects as hardly more than experimental animals.” (Munson, p.418) From the last statement, it refers to the subjects as being nothing more than animals. If I were placed in this study I would religiously follow the Natural Law theory. This theory states that the view that the rightness of actions is something determined by nature itself, rather than by the laws and customs of societies of the preferences of individuals. (Munson, p.493) It would be