The 40-year U.S. government study, which began in 1932,
examined the effects of untreated syphilis on some 400 impoverished
African-American males who were not advised they had the disease, nor
that they were subjects in the study. Rather than treating the men with
penicillin, which by the mid-1940s had become a successful cure for
syphilis, public health service officials deliberately excluded the men
from treatment so as to monitor the progress of the disease. Only 127 men
survived the study.
The video, Susceptible to Kindness: Miss Evers' Boys and the Tuskegee
Syphilis Study, features scenes from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated play
Miss Evers' Boys, written in 1989 by Cornell professor and physician David
Feldshuh. The play examines the Tuskegee study through the character of
Miss Evers, based on Eunice Rivers, an African-American public health
nurse who helped conduct the study.
Reactions to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments
"Race enabled doctors to discount their [study members'] value, but class
- the fact that they did not have access to medical care in a
fee-for-services system - made them for sale cheap. So cheaply that you
could give them a burial, a free meal and a few bucks and watch them die."
"How could physicians become involved in something that, clearly in
retrospect, was immoral. If I had been a physician in the 1930s would I
have joined the study? How would I know today that I'm not involving
myself in something that 50 years from now might be considered the
Tuskegee study of the 1990s?"
"I think clearly racial discrimination was fundamental and at the root of the
Tuskegee study."
John Cutler, physician, U.S. Public Health Service, 1942-67: "In the war
against venereal disease, if a few people had to suffer, it's unfortunate.
They were doing it for the rest of their race."
"We must not be afraid to ask ourselves tough questions about racism,
classism and human experimentation," said Palmer, who served as executive
producer of the video. "Human experimentation - as we have seen from the
recent revelations over radiation treatments - is a part of our country's
history. We have to learn from the past and think critically about what
are the best decisions to make in these areas in the future."
The Susceptible to Kindness video is currently being used in a medical
ethics course at the Cornell Medical College in New York. "The video
provides a dramatic portrayal of a real case in medical research for our
session on Honesty, Dishonesty and Fraud in Medicine," said course
director Dr. Pamela Williams-Russo, an assistant professor of medicine.
"You're learning ethics not to make that decision," snapped Monhian, who
believed the patient's health should not be at the mercy of some medical
study.