Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is Stuff you should Know about one of the more shameful chapters in US history and indeed medical history. I think you could say too.
Yeah, for sure. And by the way, if you hear weird noises, my immediate neighborhood is sort of crazy right now.
What's going on?
Well, I've got construction next door, I've got a lawn crew across the street, and they're also shooting a movie across the street. So it's just pandemonium is happening outside these sort of quiet doors.
You know what. I would call that shameful.
Not like this no episode, for sure.
That was my attempt at segaway.
Yeah, nice work.
I don't know about that, but thanks.
By the way, this one is a listener recommended and a teenage listener. This came from Miles Kendrick, a fourteen year old.
Nice Miles, great idea.
Yeah, thanks for that.
Yeah, we're talking about what's called the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment or Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and the actual official name for it was the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.
Yeah, that spells it all out, doesn't it.
It does. The fact that there's an official title for this just really kind of goes to show you just how nefarius the whole thing was. And it was indeed a nefarious experiment, no matter. It doesn't really matter how you slice it. You can look at it any number of ways and it always still washes out stinky.
Yeah, it does. And this was an experiment. I mean, I guess we'll go ahead and say what happened generally is that they recruited black men in Macon County, Alabama that had syphilis. Kind of one of the misconceptions is that they were given syphilis as part of this. Not true, but don't worry. We did that in Guatemala, as we'll
see later on. Yeah, and sign them up for this study where they would not treat these men of syphilis just to see how it progressed, basically because they had this notion and you know, of course just doesn't excuse anything. But one of the supposed reasons that they had this notion that syphilis would was different in white men than black men, and that in black men, it was more cardiovascular based as far as the symptoms and the results,
and then in white men it was more neurological. And it was initially supposed to be a six month thing, but it went on not for four years, not for fourteen years, but for forty years.
Yeah. I mean it started out in nineteen thirty two in the Jim Crow South and it carried right through the entire Civil Rights era. A number of other historical things happened during this time that should have given the
researchers pause. From what I saw, the best explanation is not that these people were inherently evil, although you can make a case that at least one of the people who led the study at one point was we'll talk about him later in Guatemala, But more that they just came to see these these men, these individuals, these human beings, there's nothing more than a data set, and that they stripped them of their humanity so thoroughly that they didn't
even really think that this was there was anything wrong with what they were doing, even over the course of forty whole years.
Yeah. And the reason why they chose Macon County is a few reasons. One, it's proximity to Tuskegee, which was you know, key is the place where they carried this stuff out and others because they they zoned in on that area because they initially were trying to find out how many people had syphilis and where so they could treat these men, right, and they found that Macon County, Alabama had the highest prevalence of syphilis. And also in this last art comes from the files that were released
and collected I think in the last decade. Even they were sharecroppers, there were rural men, and they were poor men. And the quote that was in these papers that I found was that they found them immobile and malleable.
Yeah, they were an extremely vulnerable population. I mean even among the black population at large in the Jim Crow era, these were like the most vulnerable people and they had less rights than even other black people at the time in America. So yeah, they picked on them very specifically.
And that you kind of hinted at something that I find as one of the most cynical aspects of this whole thing, that initially the program that was working down there was a well funded program that was treating syphilis, and then the funding ran out of that and they said, well, we still have all these people that we know have syphilis. Let's try something different and not treat them. And that was the beginning of the whole thing.
Yeah, And it's also key to point out before we get into the grizzly details, is that these men did not know they had syphilis, and then they also thought that they were being treated. They were told they had quote bad blood, and the whole time they thought they were getting treatment when they were getting placebos.
Right. Yeah. And then there were I read a couple of men who suspected or knew they had syphilis and wanted to go get it treated, and the people running the study prevented them from getting it treated, either by telling them not to go do that or by telling doctors in the area, do not treat any of these men because they're part of the study we're carrying out. Because that's another thing too. I think a lot of people think that this was some secret government study conducted
in absolute silence. It was not at all. It wasn't even an open secret. It wasn't a secret at all, so much so that the people running the study published thirteen different journal articles over the course of that forty years and put out annual reports, published annual reports on the progress of this thing. So it was just right out there, and people just overlooked it or ignored it for four decades. Yeah.
It was a time when you know, the medical community certainly was aware, but the public at large and the media didn't really look into you know, medical papers and stuff like they.
Do these days.
Yeah, And we should point out that all of this was done despite a nineteen twenty seven statute in the state of Alabama that requires treatment of syphilis, Like it was a state law that they just rushed aside, basically, And all of this done for the promise of hot meals, treatment and burial insurance basically.
Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty good setup. I think we should kind of describe what these men were suffering from, yeah, in the first place, and talk a little bit about syphilis.
Let's do.
It was caused by a bacterium called its spiral shaped and it's called the Treponema palladum bacterium. And they don't know where it came from, but they know that it dates at least all the way back to Naples in fourteen ninety five when mercenaries serving in the French Army got syphilis and then very quickly spread it far and wide, because for eight years later it was in India and China.
That's pretty fast, man.
Yeah.
One of the reasons it was so fast is because these were armies pillaging and raping, and syphilis is primarily
transmitted through sexual contact. It can also be transmitted or transferred from an infected woman to her fetus, but for the most part it comes from unprotected sex to this std Yeah, and there's a there's a hypothesis that it came back with Columbus and his men, who were again pillaging and raping, and they had contracted what is considered a new world disease, syphilis, and brought it back to Europe,
and that's where it spread. Apparently, there's no actual hard evidence of this or hard proof, but the timing, I think is what people zero in on. I mean, it first popped up in fourteen ninety five, and everyone knows thanks to that child prodigy whose name escapes me right now, Stoner. I think her last name is Stoner Sackler. The Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue in fourteen ninety.
Two, that's right, and if you got syphilis, you were in for a pretty rough run, including possibly eventually death in a lot of cases. If you were an infant, it could be certainly fatal. It could cause blindness and deafness. It could cause facial differences with teeth and the nose
brain complications. Of course, if you were an adult, you would get lesions, and then within a few months it goes into the second stage, where you have lesions basically all over your body, rashes and pains and headaches, and finally the disease in the third phase, it dials back at abates a little bit where it's not transmissible. But in that latency period, all of a sudden, it can attack your organs, specifically your liver and cause liver failure and kill.
You, and blindness and neurological impacts like dementia and paralysis. And that's one of the things that makes it so insidious is after the initial infection symptoms, it just seems like it went away, and then out of nowhere it can just come back and kill you. Like you're saying, right, So this is what these men specifically in this study were dealing with. I think all of them were in late latency syphilis where they didn't necessarily have symptoms any longer.
And the idea that this was an indefinite open study that was essentially like this study will end when all these guys are dead, meant that they were specifically by not treating them waiting to see how they died, including from complications of syphilis like you said, that included organ failure throughout the body.
Yeah, And they ended up getting three hundred and ninety nine men that were infected and then two hundred and one that served as a control. And part of the recruitment involved a Tuskegee Institute nurse named Eunice Rivers, who ended up being a very vilified person because she was a black woman who helped recruit these guys. There was advertisements by word of mouth and churches and stuff like that, and she was co authored on two of the thirteen papers.
And you know, of course was vilified for this for you know, doing this to men from her own race. But it seems like she knew what was going on, but she really believed what she was being told by the Public Health Service that black men it progressed differently in them than in white men. And that's sort of the basis of what they were trying to root out.
I saw that she also reasoned it that at least these sharecroppers were getting treatment that they otherwise couldn't have afforded, which was no treatment exactly. And hot meals too, like that was I mean, this is it started during the depression. Hot meals were such an incentive that people would submit to medical experiments for them. So that was a like it's easy now to look to overlook how important that was, but that was a big, a big deal sweetener for them.
Yeah, and penicillin was something that they had been you know, they'd been searching for something like penicillin for a long time, especially in Germany. They were looking for they called it a magic bullet that would, you know, kill the micro organism, kill the bacteria without harming the cells that it was infecting. And from nineteen ten on they had some stuff that kind of worked, something called oh boy, here we go ares phenamine? Yeah, do you or spinamine?
That's what I was going to go with nice coorts.
But in nineteen forty a Scottish position named Alexander Fleming came along and had proven basically in nineteen twenty eight that penicillin worked, and in nineteen forty was when it was finally published in the Lancet. Is like, hey, this is sort of this miracle magical that we were looking for, and you know, nineteen forty is kind of squarely in the middle of this study. Yet they didn't use penicillin still to heal these guys.
No, I mean like the fact that a treatment, because before that treatment was really bad for you. They would like people have been using mercury to treat it since about fifteen hundred and then that arsphenamine was a type of arsenic I think you said so, like it might not have worked, It took a year, it was very expensive, and it was not a pleasant thing. When the penicillin came along, you could get one injection of high dose
penicillin and it could cure syphilis in eight days. It could even cure late stage latency syphilis that was already attacking your organs. It could at least cure the it wouldn't reverse the organ damage. So the fact that they knew that this existed, I read the Public Health Service was instrumental in developing penicillin as a treatment for syphilis. So it's not like the Public Health Service hadn't heard
that that penicillin worked. That is one of the more damning points, Like there's no defense that they could offer that would justify withholding penicillin since they knew it worked, and the study went on for what thirty one more years after that?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone ever contended that it was on the table like, hey, we have a cure, now it's going to stop, because they that's not what they were after to begin with.
No, And in fact, there were quotes from people later on who were involved and tried to defend it that was basically like, yeah, we had to we had to actively make sure that these guys didn't get penicillin from other doctors who didn't know about the study for things like colds or whatever, because they would accidentally cure the syphilis. That's the links that they went to, like the penicillin was an enemy to this study essentially, is how they thought of it.
Well, one more link that they went to before we take a break was when World War II rolls around, they purposefully made sure that these study subjects, these men were exempted from the draft. Because when you go through the draft process, you get tested for STDs and treated for STDs, and so they're like, no, no, no, that'll ruin our study. We got to make sure these guys don't
get drafted. So the takeaway from that is is these men probably would have been better off like being drafted and potentially even like storming the beach at Normandy than being at home in Alabama being quote unquote treated by doctors.
That's a good point. And the way that they did it too kind of shows just how complicit a lot of people in the area where it's not that the public Health service didn't pull some strings to make this happen. They went to the director of public health for Macon County and said, hey, you're friends with the guy running the Selective Service board. Why don't you, you know, make sure that this works. And he did. He pulled the
right strings and and he made it happen. But so this was a there were a lot of people who came together to make this happen and to prevent these men from getting their syphilis treated one way or another.
All right, let's take that break and we'll be right back right after this.
Okay, we're back, Chuck and we should probably talk about how this study began.
Yeah, it was launched by the director of phs's Venereal Disease Division, someone named Talia Faroh Clark, and it was a two arms study again, a control group and an infected group. And I believe Clark did not suggest giving placebos, even though that happened. But he also didn't say, Hey, you know, we're trying to study the difference between how it progresses in black men and white men. Let's bring in some white men. They strictly focused on black men.
Yeah, there was actually a reason for that. There was a study that was very similar that was conducted in Oslo, Norway, from eighteen ninety one to nineteen ten, and the results were published in nineteen twenty nine that did the same thing but to all white men. So essentially they used that data from the Oslo study as a comparison, or they planned to. I guess, yeah, sure right, so you know, it's all good.
Tuskegee itself was chosen again I mentioned because of its proximity to where they were, you know, drawing from for Macon County, but also because of the government links with the Tuskegee Institute.
Booker t.
Washington had come along and really shaped a critical educational institution in the United States. They were serving needy black people of Alabama and it's you know, that's another one of the just big shames is that it puts such a black eye on what this you know, kind of great institution.
Yeah, I mean, this is the hospital where people would go. This is I think where nurse Eunice Rivers worked too. So it was a huge betrayal of that community. And I mean, even though it's developed by leaps and leaps and bounds and it's now Tuskegee University, like you said, it was a black eye. But even worse than that. Everybody calls this, including us, the Tuskegee Experiment. They don't call it the Public Health Service Syphilis experiment or the
US government syphlists experiment. So it's an ongoing black guy on Tuskegee University too.
Yeah.
For sure, they were deceived from the beginning, you know, like we said at Bears repeating that they thought they were signing up for treatment. In fact, they called it a quote special free treatment end quote. And you know, so these guys lined up for it. You know, they thought they had bad blood and they got placebos in the name of aspirin, mainly like five thousand pink aspirin
tablets were shipped in nineteen thirty four. Also, these these tonics that then tinctures they would mix up that you know, they said, was gonna get their bad blood treated.
Yes, so you said that tel Afario Clark or Talafaro Clark, and it conceived of this whole study. I think he stepped aside pretty early on, and starting in nineteen thirty three. The next year a guy named Raymond Vanderler picked up and took over and actually expanded it and now said, Okay,
we're looking for neurological effects. Let's start giving these guys spinal taps that are really really dangerous, can be really painful, and can give you horrible headaches afterward too, So let's just throw that in for you know, just for kicks.
Yeah. And also in those papers that were released and collected recently, that same person there was a letter where he was talking about all the complaints from oh, yes, so the patients getting spinal taps and how awful it was, and he was like I'm paraphrasing, but basically like now I'm the one with the headache.
Yeah, yeah, he said that. So, yes, this is kind of like the patronizing, at the very least patronizing tone that the people running this experiment had toward everybody.
Yeah.
So we said also that penicillin came around in the late nineteen forties or nineteen forties at some point, and that was one thing that it was like, Okay, you guys should have stopped everything and giving these guys penicillin.
Another thing happened in the nineteen forties that essentially should have put an end to this, and that was the Nuremberg Trials after World War Two, where, among other people, a bunch of Nazi doctors, I think twenty three Nazi doctors were put on trial for war crimes for running horrible, horrific medical experiments on people during World War Two, and
I think seven of them were sentenced to death. And yet despite that, the people running this syphilist study were just like, gosh, that, I mean, Nazis suck good thing. We're not Nazis. We're just going to continue on with this experiment.
Yeah. In nineteen fifty seven, this is in the twenty fifth year, the Surgeon General awarded certificates to these patients like, you know, congratulations on all your work here in this
and participating in this study. And then later on in nineteen ninety three, one of the researchers, John Charles Cutler, and we're going to talk about him a bit later as well, there was a quote where he said it would be undesirable to go ahead and use large amounts of penicillin to treat the disease, because you'd interfere with
the study. So you know, they were on record like time and time again, through countless different changes over these forty years at Tuskegee, these doctors and nurses, the people in the public health system, Like it wasn't just like one like mad scientist running the show all these years. It was just new people kind of changing hands and leading this charge like year after a year for forty years.
Yeah. And one of the things that they clung to, both internally and externally is this idea that became outdated when penicillin came along, but they still kept going with this excuse was that treating late latency, late stage syphilis
could actually cause more harm than good. You could get this syphilis stirred up again and that could cause that organ failure, so you're better off not treat And by the time penicillin came along, by the time Nuremberg came along, all of these patients would have been in late latency syphilis were they not already. So that was the thing, Like, that was what they would push back on, even though
it was not true anymore. I like, once penicillin came along, it was not dangerous at all, and it really really worked, and yet they still use that as an excuse whenever it was challenged. It was very rarely challenged, but it was challenged by some people, as we'll see.
Yeah, there was the first person brave enough to even say anything was named Count Gibson. He was a Richmond physician heard about the study through a lecture in the nineteen fifties from Sydney Olanski and wrote a letter saying, I'm gravely concerned about the ethics of the entire program.
He continued to sort of observe the study after penicillin came along, and he, you know, Alonski basically came back and said, I think our work is helping out these participants overall, and just keep quiet about it.
Yeah, just all of the thinnest excuses that that was what they would defend themselves with. I guess Count Gibson did end up keeping quiet because the medical college that he worked at in Virginia essentially said you need to be quiet or else, I would guess, lose your job. So that was in the fifties, right, Yeah. Next up was a guy named Bill Jenkins, who was one of the CDC's first African American professional workers. He was a statistician.
His widow also called him a essentially a radical that was very involved in the civil rights movement from a very early time. And he learned about this and the bald face racism that was just inherent, and it really obviously stuck in his craw and he tried very hard to get the New York Times in the Washington Post to cover it, and they didn't. He later said, we probably should have a press release and done it differently. They just sent all this stuff in the New York
Times and WAPO. It's not clear whether they would have published anything on it anyway, but he gave it a try, and he eventually was like, I can't do anything else. I think he also tried internally too to get it to stop, and it just didn't happen.
Yeah, so that was sixty and sixty four. There was a Detroit cardiologist named Irwin J. Shatz, and he was like, I can't believe what's going on, Like I read this study, because again, you know, they were putting out these studies in the medical community was reading them and some people were like, wait a minute, what is going on down there? And he said, I suggest that you reevaluate your moral
judgments on this. And there was a co author named Anne R. Yobs who said it was a co author of the Syphilist study that said it was the first letter they got like that and that she planned to ignore it.
Yeah. So yeah, they were also pretty arrogant in this stuff too. Well. They eventually ran head to head with a guy named Peter Buxton who was working for the Public Health Service. He was a venereal disease investigator in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. I think he was twenty eight in the late sixties or mid sixties, sorry, nineteen sixty five, and he, I guess heard a colleague talking about this study and said, which a what? And he
started looking into the reports. He got the Public Health Service people running this the Venereal Disease Division to send him all of their reports, and he read through them and he could not believe what he was reading. And he went directly to William J. Brown, who was the head of the Venereal Disease Division at the time, and he said, like, what are you doing. You stop this. This is a horribly unethical study. I can't believe you guys are doing this. And William J. Brown said, well,
it's all good. These guys are getting medical care that they otherwise wouldn't. And by the way, did we say it's dangerous to treat people with late stage syphilis? And I'm sure Peter Buckson said no, it's not. William Brown said yes it is. And it just went like that for a while.
Well, they also responded that, hey, this is political dynamite, and a nineteen sixty nine review said it was a hot potato. So like they knew, you know, like full well at this point that it was morally and ethically wrong and racist, and that like if this got out, like this has started when they kind of internally started talking about, hey, if this got out, this would look really bad. Before this, I don't even think they even thought about it but Buckston would end up being a whistleblower.
He would send his files to the AP, and an AP reporter named Gene Heller wrote a article that ended up being published in the New York Times, And that was in nineteen seventy two, seven years after Buxton first started looking into it. And that's what finally blew it wide open.
Yeah, and I saw that despite being aware that this could look bad for the public Health Service, I think now the CDC, the people involved in the study were really surprised and taken aback by the public outrage that erupted in immediately from this article. I mean, because it was AP. That meant all of the newspapers across the country carried it, and a lot of them put it on their front page. So everyone all of a sudden
knew about this horribly unethical, racist study. And it came to art screeching, halt.
Boy, that sounds like a great time for a break. Yes, you can't throw on the brakes without taking a break, that's our motto.
Yep, we'll be right back, all right.
So Josh threw on the brakes just like the doctors performing the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and teen seventy two, it was a big political scandal Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts called congressional hearings. Buxton testified there, of course, And in nineteen seventy two, kind of late nineteen seventy two, an ad hoc advisory panel said, you got to stop this study. It's pretty clear it's ethically unjustified.
Was the quote.
And it results in quote, disproportionately meager compared with known risks to the human subjects involved.
Yeah, and I mean when they started to look into it, they were like, this study is not even particularly scientific. And one of the big things I saw was in an episode of a podcast called Distillation by the Science History Museum, and they were basically saying, some of these guys did accidentally get treated with penicillin. Other guys in
the control group accidentally contracted syphilis. And so they would just take one and be like, Okay, you're in the control group now because you got you got treated accidentally, you caught accidentally, you're in this untreated group. They would just shuffle people around. It was not a very well run study, considering how much time and effort was put into it.
Yeah, I mean they never got any like great data in return for this forty years of you know, I mean torture basically.
You know, the data I saw that they did get was possibly as many as one hundred and twenty eight of these men died from untreated syphilis. Yeah, like that's the bottom line here. They would not have otherwise died because penicillin is so effective. They died specifically because they were participants in this study. And that is that. There's no other way to put it.
Yeah, I mean, if you remember in nineteen ninety seven, I remember when this happened, President Clinton invited at the time, there were eight living survivors of the experiments to the White House to offer, you know, the formal apology and said it was like a clearly racist, shameful thing that you endured. And this was after a legal settlement settlement. There was a ten million dollar legal settlement and benefit
program at the time. I think when it ended, seventy men who had not received treatment were still alive, and the survivors got thirty five thousand dollars, their heirs got fifteen thousand dollars from a class action lawsuit. And then they started in nineteen seventy three to Tuskegee Health Benefit Program basically like, hey, we're going to provide medical care for your survivors, for your families, for widows, for your children, basically starting in nineteen seventy five.
Yeah, because that's something that is forgotten. A lot of times, these men had families, they had wives, They sometimes had wives that they were still having babies with. So like their spouses and their newborn children were at tremendous risk of contracting syphilis because they were in this untreated programs. So free health care for the life of them, their spouses and their children seems like the like step one, the most basic thing that you could do, you know.
Yeah, and you know, the effects of this were devastating, certainly to those families and to the men who participated
and died, and even the ones who didn't. But an ongoing effect has been felt, you know, even today and since then they've done studies and found data basically that all but proves that the Tuskegee experiments had a negative effect on African Americans in the United States, not trusting doctors, not trusting nurses, not trusting the medical establishment at all, and not seeking treatment and having negative health effects because of this, and they've basically proven it because it's even
more localized, Like the closer you get to making county, the more the data has proven that people did not trust doctors.
Yeah, and that's another moniker that I'm sure Tuskegee University is not happy about. It's called the Tuskegee effect.
Yeah.
One of the pieces of datum that I saw that really kind of caught my eye was that black men in America seeking out professional medical help dropped by twenty two percent in the four years following when the news of this story broke, So it had a pronounced effect.
And in nineteen ninety seven, nineteen ninety seven, so this is twenty five years after the study was finished, there was a study that found that thirty two point one percent of black women surveyed in a study agreed that scientists were not trustworthy, compared to four point one percent of white women at the time.
Yeah, and there was another thing too, It was the Tuskegee effect is widely blamed for making containing the AIDS epidemic in the nineteen eighties and nineties in the black community so difficult, And a twenty twenty one study found that twenty seven point seven percent of the people the Black Americans surveyed found that they believed the governments created aids to essentially carry out a genocide against Black Americans. Yeah,
that's the level of distrust that came from Tuskegee. But there's a historian who knows all about this, name Susan Reverbie, and she was on that Distillation podcast episode and she essentially said, that's true. But pinning all of this on the Tuskegee experiment ignores all of the structural racism that it's still going on.
Yeah.
Yeah, that has that it's like current and is keeping the whole thing fresh in the minds of Black Americans because it didn't just happen once and they lost trust. It happens again and again and again every day essentially to Black Americans when they seek healthcare in the United States.
Yeah, Tuskegee just kind of put a bow on it, you know.
Yeah.
So, of course things changed in the medical community, and you know, sort of ethics control after this, after nineteen seventy two, Congress and the National Institutes of Health change rules of just you know, humans participating in studies and experiments, obviously requiring informed consent for stuff like that, peer review of not the results, but the studies design, Like, before you can even go out and get into this and launch a study or an experiment like this, it has
to be peer reviewed and okayed. And then in nineteen seventy four, the National Research Act was signed into law, resulting in kind of a laundry list of regulations and standards in the wake of Tuskegee.
What's crazy is this is the seventies and it took the news of this experiment for the United States to officially adopt informed consent for medical experiments, despite the Nuremberg Code that basically said if you're running a medical experiment anywhere in the world, your patients need to be fully informed and give informed consent in nineteen forty seven. So I just found that awful that it took so long for the US to formally adopt that.
Yeah, I mean, I think this wasn't like the norm because doctors, you know, most times had ethics when shooing the experiments and inform consent was a thing. But yeah, to codify it like that and taking that long is just you know, outrageous.
It also, I guess created a subsequent report in nineteen seventy nine called the Belmont Report that said, there are three things you need to do if you're carrying out a medical experiment involving humans. You have to have respect for the people involved. You have to show beneficence, which is essentially like you need to go beyond the basic minimum requirements of making sure these people are protected and actually exert some sort of kindness even like go way
beyond that. And then justice equality and treatment equality and including participants equality and distributing the results of the stuff and the fruits of these studies. So those things got adopted as well, but not until nineteen ninety five, sixteen years after the report.
Yeah. Ninety five was also when President Clinton ordered, you know, sort of a slew of presidential committees on bioethics and
how things were done. So yeah, a long long time after it ended, we promised talk of Guatemala because a very similar and worse thing happened in Guatemala in nineteen forty six, forty seven, and forty eight when the United States government funded medical research which did not study untreated syphilis in Guatemalans, they deliberately exposed and infected Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners,
sex workers, mental patients with syphilis. I feel like we've talked about this before, it seems at some point, but it's horrific how they went about this.
Yeah, three of these patients died. Only seven hundred of them received even some sort of minimal treatment. And the guy that I said you could argue is evil who was involved in the Tuskegee experiment was the guy who ran this, doctor John Charles Cutler. He ran it from nineteen forty six to nineteen forty eight. This was not the first experiment like this. He also would run stuff like this in prisons as a fresh face student just
out of graduate school. So he and he's also the one who in nineteen ninety three defended the whole Tuskegee experiment by saying like, yeah, you couldn't give penasilis people had ruined the study.
Yeah, and he gave people syphilis by injecting it, sometimes into their eyes. He would infect sex workers by infecting cotton swabs and then inserting them into their you know, sex organs, and then sometimes ordering them to have sex with men to see how it you know, how it transferred, how easily it transferred.
Yep. So we said that structural racism still exists in healthcare. And I've got one last stat that kind of drives
us home. There was a twenty twenty study of emergency rooms in Oregon and they found that even though black patients who went seeking help to an emergency room had completed pain scores about at the same rate as the black patients who went to these same emergency rooms, the doctors decided that only fourteen percent of these black patients deserve pain meds compared to twenty percent of white patients. So it's still going on today, and we still have
a very long way to go. And I feel like as long as we keep talking about the Tuskegee experiment, hopefully it'll bring us a little bit closer, a little bit closer, because here in the United States, we don't like to do things the right way quickly. It takes us a very long time sometimes.
Yeah, And I you know, I'm not getting on a soapbox, but it's important to tell theselories now because stories like this are actively being scrubbed from places like the Smithsonian, and it's not you know, you can't ignore your negative history as a country and learn anything about your future as a country.
For sure, we should put that on a T shirt.
Chuck, that's a little little wordy.
Well, Chuck just gave us a great new T shirt idea everybody, whether he likes it or not. So that means it's time for a listener mail.
You know what, let's not do listener mail. We haven't done this since I feel like the early years. I feel like we should put out a call to help grow our show a little bit. We've just kind of been on coast forever as far as like saying, hey, like, tell your friends about this, but let's do this, and you tell me if you approve, and if not, we'll
just erase all this. Okay, But I charge every listener who loves stuff you should know, tell find your favorite episode ever, whether it's Ballpoint Pins or The Uppets or the time the Nazis invaded Florida. dB Cooper, dB Cooper, Like, whatever your favorite stuff you should know episode is, and send it to three friends and say, hey, check the show out. I think you'll I think you'll like it,
and that would help us out. We're always looking to, you know, grow the show and expand to new audiences who have never heard of us even after seventeen years, so it really helps us out and we would really appreciate it.
Very nice, Chuck. I think that was great. I don't object to that at all.
Fantastic.
Well, like Chuck said, go forth and spread the gospel of Stuff you Should Know. And in the meantime, if you want to send us an email, you can send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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