Light on the Shadow of the
Syphilis Study at Tuskegee

Thomas, Stephen B., PhD and Quinn, Sandra Crouse, PhD (2000) Light on the Shadow of the
Syphilis Study at Tuskegee. Health Promotion Practice 1(3):234-237.

Abstract

In the 1940s, with the disclosure that Nazi doctors
had conducted experiments on humans, the term
research crime appeared for the first time. Most
Americans believed such abuses could never happen
here. On a hot day in July 1972, however, the national
front-page news described an experiment
sponsored by the U.S. government. In Macon County,
Alabama, a large group of Black men had gone untreated
for syphilis. Over 4 decades, as some of them
died, the U.S. government went to great lengths to ensure
that the men in the Tuskegee Study were denied
treatment, even after penicillin had become the standard
of care in the mid-1940s