Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments example essay topic

Ethical issues arise not only in the clinical setting of a hospital or doctors office, but in the laboratory as well. A main concern of medical ethicist's is monitoring the design of clinical trials and other experiments involving human subjects. Medical ethicist's are particularly interested in confirming that all the subjects have voluntarily given their consent and have been fully informed of the nature of the study and its potential consequences. In this particular area of medical ethics, one infamous period in history has echoed loudly for more than half a century: the experiments conducted by Nazi doctors on captive, unwilling human subjects during World War II (1939-1945). Under the guise of science, thousands of Jews and other prisoners were subjected to grotesque and horrifying procedures. Some were frozen to death, or slowly and fatally deprived of oxygen in experiments that simulated the effects of high altitude.

Others were deliberately infected with cholera and other infectious agents or subjected to bizarre experiments involving transfusions of blood or transplants of organs. Many underwent sterilization, as Nazi doctors investigated the most efficient means of sterilizing what they considered inferior populations. In all, these inhumane acts so outraged the world that, after the war, trials were held in Nuremberg, Germany, and many of the responsible Nazi physicians were convicted and executed as war criminals. These trials essentially marked the beginning of modern medical ethics. The international tribunal that prosecuted the Nazi doctors at Nuremberg drew up a list of conditions necessary to ensure ethical experimentation involving humans. This document, which came to be called the Nuremberg Code, stressed the importance of voluntary, informed consent of subjects in well-designed experimental procedures that would aid society without causing undue suffering or injury.

(Angell. 1990) Unfortunately, not all scientists adhered to the Nuremberg Code. In the United States, the decades following World War II saw several incidents of experiments on unwitting subjects who had not given informed consent. During the 1940's and 1950's, for example, hundreds of pregnant women were given a radioactive solution that enabled doctors to measure the amounts of iron in their blood. In the mid-1950's scientists infected developmentally disabled children at a New York state hospital with hepatitis in order to test a vaccine for the disease. In the early 1960's doctors injected cancer cells into the skin of elderly, debilitated patients in a hospital in Brooklyn, New York, to study the patients immune responses.

Perhaps the most shameful episode in American medical history was the federal governments Tuskegee syphilis experiment. This 40-year study began in 1932 in Tuskegee, Alabama, and tracked the health of approximately 600 African-American men, two-thirds of whom suffered from the sexually transmitted disease syphilis. Most of the subjects were poor and illiterate, and the researchers deliberately kept the syphilis victims uninformed of their condition. Worse yet, the researchers did not treat the disease, even though a cure for syphilis was readily available during the last 30 years of the study. Instead, the Public Health Service tracked the men, using them to study the physiological effects of untreated syphilis. The experiments started in 1932 and lasted for over 40 years.

They were a result of a sudden emergence in the need for health care for black men. In the years leading to the 20th century many physicians believed syphilis would surely terminate the black race. However, they cared little about this until they realized if action were not taken the disease would spread quickly through the white race, as well. Throughout the 1920's the Public Health Service (PHS) attempted to ease the pain of the blacks in the South.

Six different sites covering a broad type of conditions were selected to set up syphilis control programs; Macon County, Alabama was one of these. These experiments took place at the United States Veterans Hospital, on the Edge of the Tuskegee Institutes campus. In what was to only last a year, 399 black men with tertiary syphilis (all of who were in the late state of syphilis when the study began) and 201 without syphilis (control group) were used to study the disease. After the first year was over the PHS and its corresponding departments (the Macon County Health Department and The Alabama State Board of Heath which consisted of whites, and the Tuskegee Institute which consisted of blacks) decided to continue the research over an extended period of time. These black men were denied treatment for syphilis, as were their family members. Some of the men died in the process of the experiments for various reasons; while others died of the disease itself, or from complications.

The men were also denied treatments for other types of diseases or sicknesses, with the exception of aspirin. They were basically tortured for a span of forty years, unless of course they died in the process. Astoundingly, the experiments were in no way kept secret. They were periodically placed in medical journals throughout the years.

Finally, in 1972 after falling under great criticism, the PHS abruptly halted the studies, thus ending the cruelest experiments recorded in American history. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments were a tragedy of race and medicine..