was still built upon and inundated with racist concepts. But by the early 20 th century, the cultural and medical landscape of the U.S.
Constitution formally ended the enslavement of black Americans. In 1865, the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. To really understand the heinous nature of the Tuskegee Experiment requires some societal context, a lot of history, and a realization of just how many times government agencies were given a chance to stop this human experimentation but didn’t. Even after penicillin was discovered as a safe and reliable cure for syphilis, the majority of men did not receive it. Actually, they received no treatment at all.
But the subjects were unaware of this and were simply told they were receiving treatment for bad blood. The goal was to “observe the natural history of untreated syphilis” in black populations. The “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” was conducted by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and involved blood tests, x-rays, spinal taps and autopsies of the subjects. Starting in 1932, 600 African American men from Macon County, Alabama were enlisted to partake in a scientific experiment on syphilis.