Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "In late July of 1972, Jean Heller of the Associated Press broke the story: for forty years the United States Public Health Service (PHS) had..." (more)
Key Phrases: syphilis control work, syphilis control demonstrations, negro health problem, Nurse Rivers, Macon County, Public Health Service (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

James T. Patterson Author of The Dread Disease: Cancer & Modern American Culture By eschewing sensationalism, Jones offers a compelling narrative that enhances our understanding of race relations in the twentieth-century South, of professionalism in medicine, and of American liberalism. Bad Blood deserves to win a prize. -- Review --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

The New York Times Book Review

As an authentic, exquisitely detailed case study of the consequences of racism in American life, this book should be read by everyone who worries about the racial meanings of government policy and social practice in the United States.

The Washington Post Book World

This is a valuable, superbly researched, fair-minded, profoundly troubling, and clearly written book.

C. Vann Woodward

Author of The Strange Career of Jim Crow

Bad Blood is an important book, an authentic and appalling study of how the educated deliberately deceived and betrayed the uneducated in our own times through a government agency."

Benjaminl Hooks

Executive Director, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Bad Blood is a shocking and bold report of scientific cruelty and moral idiocy...The moral and ethical questions this book raises come into sharp focus and are compelling.

James T. Patterson

Author of The Dread Disease: Cancer & Modern American Culture

By eschewing sensationalism, Jones offers a compelling narrative that enhances our understanding of race relations in the twentieth-century South, of professionalism in medicine, and of American liberalism. Bad Blood deserves to win a prize.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 297 pages
• Publisher: Free Pr; Exp&ed edition (January 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0029166756
• ISBN-13: 978-0029166758
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,391,707 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Doctors of Death, February 27, 2000

By	JLind555 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, Revised Edition (Paperback)

"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

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars or, How racism permeates..., March 20, 2004

By	Tammi L. Coles "book group moderator" (Berlin, Germany) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, Revised Edition (Paperback)

I am not a doctor, a researcher nor an ethicist. I am an African American woman who grew up in southern Virginia, has heard off-the-cuff references to the Tuskegee incident almost all of my conscious-life, and finally wanted to read its details. While I agree with one reviewer who pointed out that the text does not read like a "thriller," I found the writing easy to understand as an indictment of racism whether systemically or individually manifest. I appreciate that the author took great care to provide a general framework of how people respond to the medical establishment (e.g. "follow the doctor's orders") while also detailing the way by which the doctors deliberately manipulated that trust to ensure the compliance of rural black men and black members of the profession. The latter is important - the author shows compliance and allegiance among the black medical officials who were pulled into the experiment, subtly encouraged by monetary or status rewards. I also like how the author painstakingly pulled together the text of meetings, memos and memoirs to show how bureaucracy, tradition and group think work to create racist outcomes - it suggested a universality to it, not a "only in the medical establishment" or "only in the South" version of events. And the author's telling of how all the institutions and individuals, when caught, backpedaled or otherwise covered up their role in the experiment was just amazing... Highly recommended.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars African-American Victims Of Government Laboratory Experiments!!!, September 15, 2005

By	Taalib A. Muhammad "Seek Knowledge From The C... (New York City, United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, Revised Edition (Paperback)

One of the least known facts of U.S. history is the government sponsored syphilis experiment conducted upon 399 African-American men from 1932 to 1972. Over the course of these five decades, the U.S. Public Health Service exploited African-American sharecroppers in its effort to determine if the long-term affects of syphilis were different for black people than it was for white people. During the trials, the doctors who conducted the experimentations intentionally denied these men treatment; never informed them of syphilis' destructiveness to their health; and ignored the fact that these men were infecting their respective wives and sexual partners with the disease. As the experiments continued, doctors calculatedly deceived the subjects, informing them that they were suffering from what was categorized as: "bad blood". As the disease ravaged the minds and bodies of these unsuspecting men, no effort was made by the physicians of the Public Health Service to either inform them regarding the disease or provide them with treatment in an effort to curtail its devastating effects.

Jones presents a detailed, non-sensationalized writing that delves into the ignorance, racism and outright inhumanity that was entrenched throughout the United States; the medical arena; and society in general prior to and during these horrific experiments. He provides a plethora of documentation to substantiate the bigotry and callousness of the medical field during the era, and acknowledges the data provided by individuals who participated in the experiments or who conveyed valuable information. By the end of the experimentation, at least 28 of the men had died of syphilis; over 100 died of related complications; at least 40 of their wives had been infected, and over 20 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis.

Bad Blood should be read by all those who are of the opinion that the upper echelons of U.S. society (in this case, the medial profession and the government itself) are above despicable acts that border on genocide. Clearly there is no conspiracy "theory" here...instead we find conspiracy FACT! Perhaps former U.S. President Bill Clinton's statement regarding the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments encapsulates the incident best in his speech to the last eight survivors of the experiments in 1997: "The United States government did something that was wrong-deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens...clearly racist".