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The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, carried out in Macon, Alabama, from 1932 to 1972, is a notorious episode in the checkered history of medical experimentation. In one of the most economically disadvantaged parts of the U.S., researchers deceived a group of 399 black male syphilitics into participating in a study with no therapeutic value. These "volunteers" were not treated as patients, but rather as experimental subjects, or walking cadavers. Even after the development of penicillin, the Tuskegee group was denied effective treatment. Despite regularly published scholarly articles, forty years passed before there was any protest in the medical community. The aftereffects of the study, along with the suffering of its victims, include a series of congressional investigations, the drafting of medical ethics guidelines, and the establishment of independent review boards.
This course consists of an international analysis of the impact of epidemic diseases on western society and culture from the bubonic plague to HIV/AIDS and the recent experience of SARS and swine flu. Leading themes include: infectious disease and its impact on society; the development of public health measures; the role of medical ethics; the genre of plague literature; the social reactions of mass hysteria and violence; the rise of the germ theory of disease; the development of tropical medicine; a comparison of the social, cultural, and historical impact of major infectious diseases; and the issue of emerging and re-emerging diseases.
