Bad Blood

by James H. Jones

Book Overview

From 1932 to 1972, the United States Public Health Service conducted a non-therapeutic experiment involving over 400 black male sharecroppers infected with syphilis. The Tuskegee Study had nothing to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0029166764
• ISBN13: 9780029166765
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Sad

Sad

It Should Not Have Happened Here!

I own two copies of this important book. One to loan out to friends who believe that such a thing could not happen here in the United States, and, another copy to keep safely tucked away in my personal library.If the victims of this "Medical Experiment" had been Jewish and the perpetrators had been German, the entire workforce of the US Public Health Service would be tracked down and suitably punished for their "Crimes Against Humanity". Sound like a sily analogy? The Nazi's came to power in 1932, the same year this experiment was begun by the US National Health Service. The Nazi's were defeated in 1945, whereas, this experiment really did not end until the 1970's! Each year, the US government spends millions of Tax Payer dollars to track down ex-Nazi's for crimes committed in a foreign country while the National Health Service retiree's collect Tax Payer dollars in the form of pensions even though they denied proper medical treatment for US citizens! Now, there is AIDS. People with African ancestory are genetically far more succeptable to AIDS than any one else. After reading this book, one wonders.....

A treasure, beautifully written

I loved the loving care with which this book was written. The horror of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was that there truly was no evil intent on the part of the doctors involved, and all believed that the "patients" truly benefitted, receiving health care they otherwise would not have received for other ailments that they could not have afforded treatment for otherwise. In fact, the Tuskegee "patients" received health care for aches and pains that neither their neighbors nor even their wives and children were able to access, because of their "privileged" status as part of the "government study." Placing the story squarely in the context of its time, Jones does not excuse those who bear the responsibility for the choices they made regarding the men involved in the study, but attempts to explain to the best of his ability why those in authority made the decisions they made, even to the point of placing a black nurse in the pivotal position of overseeing the consistency of the study and maintaining contact with the study "subjects" while the doctors themselves were rotated every year as part of their own "educational" history. Even Tuskegee itself was run by black doctors who chose to look the other way when they knew, had to know, the detrimental decisions that were being made. That is how power works. That is how it worked then, and that is how it works today. Is it because of Tuskegee that the Public Health System lacks credibility? Or is it because of the ongoing and persistent ignorance and incompetence of the Public Health System itself? The system is infested with politics, funding fiascos and unethical practices. It didn't start with Tuskegee, and it certainly didn't end there. This is a very important part of the story, and should be mandated reading for anyone who wants to understand the controverted manipulations of the Public Health System. It is only the beginning, however. Don't stop there.

An agonizing read of medical irresponsibility

This book is probably one of the first of the expose type to zero in on medical culpability in the US. Most people tend to think that only Germany was capable of doing the atrocities that occurred during WWII. It was these atrocities that led to the Nuremburg Code of conduct for physicians and scientists, yet it was known prior to the Germans butchery that other countries including the US and England were equally responsible for using human beings for questionable experiments. As a student in medical school I came across references to this book and others like it. My interest lay in the fact that as a Deaf person, I know what it is like to have doctors treat me with disrespect and patronizingly. I started researching into how lack of education leads to people being taken advantage of by the medical establishment. In my research, so many referred back to this particular book, I decided I just had to read it. Not only have I read it but I have lent it to others who share my concern that there are medical practitioners out there like Kervorkian who would have no problem putting to death or using for unethical experiments, people who they view as less than people. Jones did a magnificent job of research and follow-up with those involved in this horrible fiasco. Not only were these doctors racist, but they considered anyone with lower education to be only as useful as animals...to an extent they treated these men with less care and concern then they treat animals used in experiments today. Jones was more than fair, including reasons for why these doctors and nurses, both black and white, did not perceive this long on-going experiment as being wrong. It is partially due to his exposure of this experiment, that other minority groups including the disabled are looking carefully at the medical establishment for bias and prejudice, for neglect and outright denial of fair medical treatment and availability of treatment. Every medical student, public health student, science student, educator, and frankly everyone should read this book. I am deeply concerned that if we don't pay attention to the ethics of all the new science and medical information being found, we will once again allow someone somewhere in our nation the opportunity to use a particular group of people for their own unethical purposes. We cannot afford to turn a 'blind' eye to this happening again. Karen L. Sadler, Science Education, University of Pittsburgh, klsst23@pitt.edu

It could not happen here?

I own two copies of this important book. One to loan out to friends who believe that such a thing could not happen here in the United States, and, another copy to keep safely tucked away in my personal library.If the victims of this "Medical Experiment" had been Jewish and the perpetrators had been German, the entire workforce of the US Public Health Service would be tracked down and suitably punished for their "Crimes Against Humanity".Now, there is AIDS. People with African ancestory are genetically far more succeptable to AIDS than any one else. After reading this book, one wonders.....

Doctors of Death

"Bad Blood" is a carefully researched and excellently written account of one of the most horrendous and despicable acts perpetrated by the United States Government, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. In 1932, four hundred illiterate and semi-literate black sharecroppers in Alabama who were diagnosed with syphilis were selected for an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Health Service, whose purport was to demonstrate that the course of untreated syphilis runs differently in blacks as opposed to whites. It was "race medicine" of the worst kind and, as a newspaper editorial stated when the experiment finally came to light 40 years later, it was ethically on a par with the medical experiments in the Nazi death camps. The men selected for the study were for the most part uneducated (only one man had reached the eighth grade and none had gone to high school), they were never explained the purpose of the study, and they were given no medicine to help their advancing symptoms. Even after penicillin was found in the 1940s to halt or significantly reduce the symptoms of the disease, it was withheld from the patients, who were left to suffer horrible deaths from advanced syphilis one by one. In 1972 the experiment was finally brought into the open by a young law student who passed the information to the Associated Press, and when the story broke on Page One of newspapers across the country, it caused a national firestorm. Journalists, public officials, and ordinary citizens were outraged by the news accounts. Incredibly, when the doctors involved in the experiment were asked for an accountability, their response was a collective shrug and a "so what?" The most explosive reaction, needless to say, was in the nation's black communities, which maintained that the government would never have run such an experiment on 400 white test subjects. The bitter legacy left by the Tuskegee Experiment is the fear and mistrust among many African-Americans of the entire medical establishment, and the suspicion that AIDS is a man-made disease created by the government with the express purpose of killing off blacks and gays; people who hold this belief, when asked why they think the government would do such a thing, invariably point to the Tuskegee Experiment as an example of what the government is capable of. The legacy of suspicion and mistrust generated by the Tuskegee Experiment may take generations to undo, and all of us, black and white, will be the losers. Judy Lind