James Jones Bad Blood Summary

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James H. Jones’ Bad Blood focuses on the infamous Tuskegee Study from various perspectives. Navigating the intricate relationships between the government, laboratory medicine, and race, Jones explores the history of medical ethics and fixates on the eventual medical neglect endured by over 500 Black male sharecroppers. With this, the book answers the much-anticipated question of how this injustice was seemingly sanctioned for 40 years. Conducted by the United States Public Health Service, the Tuskegee Study was started to observe the evolution of syphilis as well as its effects on Black people. Only concerned with these inquiries, the Public Health Service (PHS) did not care to identify a plausible treatment for syphilis. The participants of …show more content…
Another vital theme Jones highlights in the book is the theme of deception. Throughout the course of the entire study, infected participants were not offered any kind of remedy, although two widespread treatments were available at the time. Salvarsan, an arsenic-based drug first developed in the early twentieth century, was identified as a toxic treatment—one that required several painful injections over a long period of time. Often ineffective and unhelpful, PHS officials were able to justify their lack of action towards participants. However, penicillin, a more practical drug for treating syphilis, was also not offered to participants in the 1940s; a health official claimed that the drug was still new and “largely untested.” To counteract this denial of treatment (which didn’t really matter because participants were never made aware of such treatments), participants were incentivized to continue the study with other enticements. Seemingly insufficient, “physical treatments, hot lunches, and burial stipends” appeared attractive to poor people in the South, because part of this study took place during the Great