The Tuskegee syphilis study is an atrocious, terrible chapter in American history. A historical example of national terrorism and medical apartheid by the government against its people. The experiment's is named after the Tuskegee Institute, a black university that was affiliated to the study but the experiment was mainly carried out by the U.S. public Health Service and it lasted for about four decades between the 1930’s -1970’s. The participants were 400 low-income African American men, many diagnosed with syphilis; the objective of the case study was to learn about the lifetime course of the infection. The subjects for the most part were illiterate farmers from one of the humblest cities in Alabama. They were never told what sickness they were suffering from or the severity of it, neither to those who had contracted syphilis even before the study began. Instead, they were just informed that they were being treated for a case of bad blood, without acknowledging they were actually being the subject of a research and that the scientists had no plan of curing them of…show more content… The doctors involved had the option of treating all syphilitic subjects and closing the experiment but the researchers did the opposite, they continued the study and offer no treatment whatsoever. The participants weren't told about the cure, and weren't given the cure. Rather, they were denied access to it and were allowed to remain sick and suffer terrible effects from a curable disease for the sake of collecting data, though knowing that their condition was always fatal without drugs and antibiotics. The goal was never to find a cure, the objective was to see how the infected survived and how they were weakened little by little due to the detrimental consequences of the disease until their
