Violation of Human Rights: Tuskegee Syphilis Study

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Discussion
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Miss Evers’ Boys is an emotional and thought-provoking movie that tells a story about a medical experiment conducted in the 20th century. The Tuskegee syphilis study was planned to be six months long, but it ended up being forty years. The medical staff involved, including Eunice Evers, the movie’s main character, made a lot of controversial, if not just wrong, decisions. The Tuskegee syphilis study had a big impact on minorities and raised a discussion concerning human rights.

Discussion

The discussion about human rights is as old as humanity itself. Even ancient philosophers, such as Aristotle, thought and wrote about it. Their views, of course, are different from modern ones, but it is essential to understand that from ancient times people recognized that they were entitled to some rights. In modernity, citizens’ rights are usually determined by their country’s Constitution. However, some human rights are more or less universal for everyone. One document that ensures those rights is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 25 of the Declaration states that “everyone has … the right to security in unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in the circumstances beyond his control” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, n.d., para. 25). The article suggests that every human being has the right to seek and receive help in case of sickness. However, the medical staff in the Tuskegee experiment denied the patients the help they needed, even when the treatment for syphilis was already known.

By refusing to treat the experiment participants the doctors and nurses denied them the right to life because syphilis can become a deadly disease if it is untreated. The authors of the study and the authorities tried to justify human rights violations by saying that they were analyzing the effects of fully developing syphilis on Black males. Moreover, the tested men did not even know they were part of an experiment.

It is not surprising that a study with such severe human rights violations had a deep and long-lasting effect on minorities in the United States. First of all, many African Americans stopped trusting the US medical system (Howell, 2017; Nix, 2017). The topics related to the Tuskegee syphilis study come up in public debates quickly after the truth was discovered. For example, Frazier’s (2020) study analyzes collective memory regarding the experiment. It is stated in the article that the most popular topic connected to those events in journals was the “exploitation of uneducated victims” (Frazier, 2020, p. 284). People criticized the government for taking advantage of those men and their lack of education. Other topics were “racism and blame”, “genocide of Black people”, and others. (Frazier, 2020, p. 284). The revelation of the Tuskegee experiment was a shock for the world community.

Community-based participatory research, also referred to as CBPR is a research strategy that aims at studying a community with the active help of its members. It is usually conducted in diverse communities that include minority groups, and one of their goals is to address health disparities those minority groups might face (Coughlin et al., 2017). The main difference between CBPR and the research strategies that were used earlier is that it recognizes the researchers and the individuals of a community as equal partners (Coughlin et al., 2017). The appearance of CBPR as a study tool indicates a big change that happened after the Tuskegee experiment.

Conclusion

To conclude, the Tuskegee syphilis study violated human rights and resulted in distrust of African Americans toward the healthcare system. The United States government tried to correct the mistake by apologizing to the victims and their families, but it will not restore those people’s health. It is an important precedent that raised a public discussion that spread awareness on such important topics as racial discrimination, equal access to education, and healthcare.