Twenty years after. The legacy of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Outside the community
- Publication date
- 1992
- Publisher
Abstract
Twenty years ago, when the Washington Star told the public that the United States Public Health Service had, since 1932, maintained a study of untreated syphilis in the Negro male that was still going on, my reaction was, How could people have done this? I later worked on the participants' lawsuit, and I learned of the study's many complexities. In the end, though, the best explanation of "how" it could have happened is the obvious one: the researchers did not see the participants as part of "their" community or, indeed, as people whose lives could or would be much affected by what the researchers did