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Title: Bad Blood Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment by James H. Jones, Jones ISBN: 0-02-916676-4 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 15 January, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.56 (9 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: or, How racism permeates...
Comment: I am not a doctor, a researcher nor an ethicist. I am an African American woman who grew up in southern Virginia, has heard off-the-cuff references to the Tuskegee incident almost all of my conscious-life, and finally wanted to read its details. While I agree with one reviewer who pointed out that the text does not read like a "thriller," I found the writing easy to understand as an indictment of racism whether systemically or individually manifest. I appreciate that the author took great care to provide a general framework of how people respond to the medical establishment (e.g. "follow the doctor's orders") while also detailing the way by which the doctors deliberately manipulated that trust to ensure the compliance of rural black men and black members of the profession. The latter is important - the author shows compliance and allegiance among the black medical officials who were pulled into the experiment, subtly encouraged by monetary or status rewards. I also like how the author painstakingly pulled together the text of meetings, memos and memoirs to show how bureaucracy, tradition and group think work to create racist outcomes - it suggested a universality to it, not a "only in the medical establishment" or "only in the South" version of events. And the author's telling of how all the institutions and individuals, when caught, backpedaled or otherwise covered up their role in the experiment was just amazing... Highly recommended.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Shocking Medical Experiment in the American South
Comment: This book was excellent and informative. However, readers should know that it is written in a research style, almost like a text book (sometimes putting the reader to sleep-and the reason I am only rating it four stars), as opposed to being written by an investigative reporter (and reading like a thriller). The book is extremely well documented. The author was intimately involved with helping lawyer Gray (Rosa Parks' lawyer) prosecute the case against the federal government, by providing much of the documentation given in this book. He began work on the book while a student in Harvard's bioethics program in 1972, and only subsequently becoming involved with lawyer Gray.
The book is a complete history from the conception of the experiment, until its termination, including the viewpoints of ALL participants. In addition to learning about the experiment itself, I learned a lot about life in the rural American South, which I had not previously known, and a lot about the disease of syphilis that I hadn't known. Some examples: I didn't know that 30-40 percent of blacks in the rural South were infected, nor that the disease crosses the placental barrier, which caused a lot of syphilitic babies. The book includes pictures of syphilitic skin lesions, and discusses multiple complications of the late stages of the disease.
The book also delves into the moral and racial issues extensively. There is an updated chapter at the end comparing the syphilis crisis to the AIDS crisis, and discusses why so many blacks are distrustful of doctors and hospitals-this experiment simply being one of the most recent examples of how this segment of our society as lied to, and taken advantage of.
What was MOST shocking to me about this book was that I was born in 1955, and this experiment continued into the mid-1970's. The FIRST time it was questioned on moral grounds was about 1962, and throughout the 60's, most doctors did not even QUESTION the morality! The story was broken the same day as Sargent Shiver's having obtained psychiatric counseling-the latter story I heard about extensively, and the former not at all! Before buying this book, I had never even heard of this medical experiment, and I just can't believe things like this were taking place IN
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA until the mid-1970's!!!
Rating: 5
Summary: Ethics of Human Experimentation
Comment: Jones has written an outstanding book which will likely make all readers question the ethics of human experimentation and why doctors choose the patients they do. The book covers the history of the Tuskeegee experiment, a study of the effects of untreated syphilis, or "bad blood," on poor black men in the South, from the 1930's to the 1970's. All of the players in the story, from the doctors, to the nurses, to the patients themselves are discussed in outstanding detail.
The syphilis study was unquestioned when it began, as many doctors did not render treatment for syphilis, which could often be much worse than the cure. However, the experiment continued for almost forty years after the development of penicillin, which would have provided a ready cure for most of the subjects and not risk exposing their wives and children to infection. The experimenters took a great deal of trouble to ensure that their patients did not receive effective treatment for syphilis anywhere. The book's additional chilling reminder is that, on top of all the human suffering caused by this study, it had no scientific value whatsoever, as many of the subjects had been treated in some way, and there were other studies on the effects of syphilis.
The concluding chapter is newly written to detail the linkages between the Tuskeegee experiment and the current AIDS crisis. This chapter discusses the reasons why many American blacks think the virus is targeted towards their communities.
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Title: Tuskegee's Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Studies in Social Medicine) by Susan M. Reverby ISBN: 0807848522 Publisher: University of North Carolina Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 2000 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The Real Story and Beyond by Fred D. Gray ISBN: 1588380890 Publisher: NewSouth Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America Before the Second World War by Susan E. Lederer ISBN: 0801857090 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1997 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans by Jonathan D. Moreno, Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewe, Terence McWilliams ISBN: 0415928354 Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group Pub. Date: 15 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation by George J. Annas, Michael A. Grodin ISBN: 0195101065 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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