‘You’ve got bad blood’: The horror of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment
“Hundreds of men — all black and many of them poor — signed up. Some of the men thought they were being treated for rheumatism or bad stomachs. They were promised free meals, free physicals and free burial insurance. What the signs never told them was they would become part of the ‘Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,’ a secret experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the progression of the deadly venereal disease — without treatment. On Tuesday, the Tuskegee History Center will mark the 20th anniversary of its founding and President Bill Clinton’s apology to the survivors of the experiment with a day-long program devoted to the fallout of the study. It destroyed the trust many African Americans held for medical institutions — a legacy that persists today.”