It’s been a dirty secret for decades. The secret? That our medical establishment in times past had used groups of poor people as guinea pigs, tested treatments on patients in mental hospitals and prisons and so forth. This history is one of the reasons there are so many safeguards put in place with any new study or test program.
Jonah Goldberg writes today about an oft mentioned program from our history that the liberals and blacks bring up pretty much every time the Wright “US infected blacks with AIDS” meme’ is thrown around:
The infamous Tuskegee experiment is the Medusa’s head of black left-wing paranoia. Whenever someone laments the fact that anywhere from 10 percent to 33 percent of African Americans believe the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill blacks, someone will say, “That’s not so crazy when you consider what happened at Tuskegee.”
But it is crazy. And it’s dishonest.
Wright says the U.S. government “purposely infected African-American men with syphilis.” This is a lie, and no knowledgeable historian says otherwise. And yet, this untruth pops up routinely. In March, CNN commentator Roland Martin defended Wright, saying, “That actually did, indeed, happen.” On Fox News, the allegation has gone unchallenged on Hannity & Colmes and The O’Reilly Factor. Obery Hendricks, a prominent author and visiting scholar at Princeton University, told O’Reilly “I do know that the government injected syphilis into black men at the Tuskegee Institute. Now we know that the government is capable of doing those things.”
To which O’Reilly responded: “All right. All governments have done bad things in every country.”
True enough. And what the U.S. did at Tuskegee was indeed bad, very bad. But it didn’t do what these people say it did.
So what did happen? In 1932, public health researchers set out to study syphilis, particularly among African Americans, who had higher infection rates than whites. They recruited 399 black men who already had syphilis. The doctors infected no one. In fact, the patients were selected in the first place because they were tertiary-stage syphilitics who were no longer contagious.
The researchers studied the progress of the disease, without treating it, for 40 years.
Prior to the availability of penicillin in the 1940s and 1950s, the researchers couldn’t have treated the men even if they wanted to. Even after standardized penicillin treatments were available, it wasn’t clear that the patients could have been helped. Some of the doctors believed that treating the decades-long infections would kill the men.
Among scholars who’ve studied Tuskegee, there’s a lot of debate about how much — if any — racism was involved in the experiment. But no one disputes that Tuskegee had nothing whatsoever to do with genocide or even a desire to spread the disease among the black population.
What was bad about the Tuskegee experiment was a callous disregard for the humanity and integrity of the patients. They were told they were getting “treatments” when they were merely being studied. They were lied to, treated as objects rather than citizens. This is even more offensive today, now that we have modern legal and ethical rules about informed consent — rules that did not exist when the study was launched. But it was still wrong.
Sure enough, the fact that they were lied to and never treated for their disease is bad. But they were not infected with it by the government. There were many abuses by our medical establishment over the course of our history but this does not somehow validate the ludicrous conspiracy theory thrown about by Rev. Wright.
One of the better questions by Jonah in his article is this one:
But why blacks remain the most reliable voters for the party of ever-expanding government power is something of a mystery. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the Tuskegee study, launched during the pre-dawn of the New Deal-era, was symptomatic of arrogant liberal government. The study “emerged out of a liberal progressive public health movement concerned about the health and well-being of the African-American population,” writes University of Chicago professor Richard Schweder. He adds: “The study was done with the full knowledge, endorsement and participation of African-American medical professionals, hospitals and research institutes.”
Liberals like to invoke Tuskegee as if it’s solely an indictment of what other people did, proof that we need more progressive government. But Tuskegee was in fact the poisoned fruit of progressive government.
And still a majority of the black population wants MORE government in their lives.
See author page
“The study was done with the full knowledge, endorsement and participation of African-American medical professionals, hospitals and research institutes.”
_Were_ there “African-American medical professionals, hospitals and research institutes.” at that time?
Oh no. African Americans didn’t learn to read, write and eat with untensiles until the 60’s.
…………………………………………………….
Meharry Medical College – The first medical school founded for the sole purpose of educating blacks in the field of medicine. Founded in 1876, Meharry is located in Nashiville, Tennessee.
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams – In 1893 he made history when he opened the chest of a young black man who had been stabbed in a fight and performed the first open-heart surgery that saved the man’s life..
Dr. William Augustus Hinton – The first Black American professor at Harvard Medical School in 1949 where he taught preventive medicine and hygiene. Also developed the test used to detect the disease syphillis. ………….
My father, a white man with prostate cancer, was used in chemo-therapy experiments from the late 1940s till his death in 1956. Do you suppose they used him instead of a Rockefeller or Mellon because we were poor? Probably. But his agreement to participate might also have played a part.
Supposedly AIDS was traced back to 1939, a time when polio, small pox, malaria, legionnaires disease and even the common flu were maiming and killing thousands if not millions of people around the world each year. Nobody needed to find or invent a new disease to infect people because those were very effective diseases of their time. In fact the bioweapons factories were not trying to invent new diseases, but making the diseases they had more lethal.
That didn’t mean that the government wasn’t involved with attacking minorities during the same time. “Legal” lynchings of blacks were going on (accused of rape for kissing whites), “black” churches were bombed in daylight without any suspects and the FBI was spying on everyone while the CIA was purposefully destroying or preventing Democracies. The saying that “The Man” was putting the coloreds (non whites) and women down was partially true. It was also true some blacks tended to sabotage any outreach program such as the NAACP (originally rich and middle class whites which got together with black leaders), public education, social programs and welfare programs. That’s just like there are regions in the U.S. where there are groups of poor whites which rejected any benefit they had just because they were white. Most people of course took the programs provided to them and made something with their lives, but there will always be that bunch with self destructive behavior that blame their problems on others and there will be those people that sell that paranoia and those type of stories.
Another slander and mischaracterization of U.S. history, is that we purposely tried to infect Native Americans with infectious diseases for the sake of genocide:
One myth is in regards to white European settlers purposely engaging in biological warfare by infecting blankets with smallbox:
And still a majority of the black population wants MORE government in their lives
No, the majority of the black population wants more government money in their hands. Victimhood is extremely popular. I’ll never forget when I got a job in middle management of a nursing home at Christmastime the blacks came to me one by one wanting money for Christmas from me personally. Mainly because I made more money than they did. This has some kind of kinky idea of giving back to the community. I was a single mother with two teenagers and barely making it but I was perceived as rich by these people.
I can attest to the fact that there was no pennicillon available during the time of the Tuskegg mess. As a child in the forties I had chronic ears infections that turned to abcesses. The only thingdoctors knew to do was let the disease run its course. There was no cure for this orany other dieseases that pennicillon cured.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA34A.htm
The article at the above link might help a bit.
Wow, I never questioned these myths until now. There has to be some way to rescue our educational system and stop the propagana that passes for academics.
blacks vote for libs because they give them more welfare benefits and food stamp cards. they love government for doing this, they see it as their right, ask any welfare worker how many formthe inner-city come in asking for their paychecks. its not only blacks, there are a whole bunch of white that do it also. i am not the reason that the blacks are down trodden. they are, they have done this to themselves. they make up these lies because it makes them feel better about sleeping around and not caring who with, they spead the illness because they just don’t care. they blame “the man”.
sorry, i guess this is my opinion, and today i am grumpy so i am putting it out there how i see it.
What about thereal atrocities against blacks?
While antibiotics had not been invented at the time the experiment was started, salvarsan and related anti-syphilis compounds based on arsenic and mercury had existed for decades. Was treatment with these an option?