Advantages And Disadvantages Of Tuskegee

Primary sources are meant to be revealing about past events as a result of directly being tied to the event. In this instance, we have the letters about Tuskegee, in which the experimenters detailed information about the study to others involved and the autobiography and Sims. Both have pros and cons as primary sources.
It is very easy to make statement in hindsight and Marion J. Sims is guilty of this. Sims is only able to make some of his declarations because he was successful in his experiment, I doubt he would have been as confident about his experiment as he writes during the time he conducting them. His ideas while he was in the midst of his operations were likely very different from the ones he had afterwards, so the tone and phrasing of a lot of the things he said would have been very different at the time. In addition, Sims was given time to edit and phrase his autobiography in a manner that may not have been the most accurate. In class, we mentioned that the use of the …show more content…
Thus, it is not possible to provide falsified information and gives better scope on what was occurring in real time for the experiments. The problem with the letters lies in the fact that it gives a rather segmented picture of the events in Tuskegee. Rather than putting the whole story together, like Sims’ autobiography does, we are meant to piece together what happens in the meantime from one letter to the next. This is why I would refute the point Jordyn makes when referencing how many points are not explained. There is no reason for the terminology to be explained since the person receiving the letter would have been aware of what the writer is referring to. There are many secondary sources in relation to the Tuskegee Study as it brought about numerous ethical flags in the US, where we see people research and react to the experiment