Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment - An Updated and Expanded Edition

Tshelane Sipho: This book exposes the manipulation of disease to meet political objectives. The selective testing of Afro-American males for syphilis defeats the purpose of medical treatment.

United States on Jun 05, 2023

Jordan Segal: Why, after coming to know this are these depts still in existence?! If you think the US Govt has has your safety as their number one concern, you should go get the clot shot. This is simply appalling and serves to prove we’re no different than those people we fought in WW2. Simply sickening that this happened. BTW, public school system never once mentioned this in any history class!

United States on Oct 23, 2022

Library: Interesting and frightening at the same time.

United Kingdom on May 05, 2021

SHARON BLAKE: This book was very interesting , especially in that this study led to the development of medical ethics guidelines and practices. Overall, the Tuskeegee Syphillis Experiment was valuable in that Dr's learned much about syphyllis and treatment of syphillis., but using human guinea pigs who had not given consent and who did not know they were being infected and would eventually die was completely unethical and cruel. Doctors purposefully selected poor and uneducated " mostly black patients, gave them rides in their cars and sandwiches as bribes so they could draw blood or sometimes inject them with syphyliis . This allowed doctors to study the stages of the disease and is no better than what the Nazis did in WWII in some of the camps

United States on Jul 14, 2020

Jasmine: Books came neatly packaged and undamaged! A very good buy.

United Kingdom on Dec 25, 2014

Imperial Topaz: This book was excellent and informative. However, readers should know that it is written in a research style, almost like a text book (sometimes putting the reader to sleep-and the reason I am only rating it four stars), as opposed to being written by an investigative reporter (and reading like a thriller). The book is extremely well documented. The author was intimately involved with helping lawyer Gray (Rosa Parks' lawyer) prosecute the case against the federal government, by providing much of the documentation given in this book. He began work on the book while a student in Harvard's bioethics program in 1972, and only subsequently becoming involved with lawyer Gray.
The book is a complete history from the conception of the experiment, until its termination, including the viewpoints of ALL participants. In addition to learning about the experiment itself, I learned a lot about life in the rural American South, which I had not previously known, and a lot about the disease of syphilis that I hadn't known. Some examples: I didn't know that 30-40 percent of blacks in the rural South were infected, nor that the disease crosses the placental barrier, which caused a lot of...

United States on May 04, 2003

Dale E. Hammerschmidt: The "study" of the natural history of syphilis in black men is important to understand. Because it involved US federal funds and US federal researchers, it was a key demonstration that serious ethical problems in research were a mainstream event rather than a fringe problem; awareness of this project fueled concern for regulatory oversight and led to the development of federal regulations. James Jones' revelations were key to this process, and everyone involved in human subjects' research should read this book. Overall, the book is well researched and well presented. One of the more frightening aspects of Tuskegee is subtle, and doesn't get as thorough a treatment as it could have; that is, some of the outrageous features of the project were not the result of single outrageous decisions, but were rather the sum of many smaller errors. These are harder for a researcher to dismiss as things s/he could never have done. As a physician, I can comfortably say that I would never deliberately deny effective therapy to someone with a serious illness. But I can not as glibly say that I would have been the one to stand up and rebel when a protocol committee in the late 1940s or early 1950s...

United States on Aug 08, 2000