Twenty years after. The legacy of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Outside the community

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.