Bad Blood Analysis

It was forty years. Forty years of secrecy, forty years of ignorance; it was forty years before the rest of the country and the rest of the world knew what those in a small town in the Black Belt of Alabama already knew. It wasn’t until July of 1972 that the Associated Press broke the story, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) had been doing what many had thought of as unthinkable. They had been conducting a study of black men in and around the city of Tuskegee. In this study, the PHS wanted to examine the effect of untreated syphilis in black men. The catch that made this study more of an ethics issue than anything is that the PHS deliberately withheld information from those participated in the study. They never told the men what …show more content…
Historian James Jones’s book Bad Blood was one the first published pieces on the experiment and most of his peers, like Susan M. Reverby, refer back to Jones’ writings as a base of early research. Jones stance on Nurse Rivers is the she was more of a victim than anything. Yes, he asserts that Rivers should be mainly held responsible for not helping bring the study to a halt. He argues that her relationships with the black residents of the area gave her enough power to end the study on her own. Jones seems to be chastising Rivers and her lack of a groundbreaking will to stand up against the “powers that be,” saying that she was “ethically passive.” But he also uses the combinations of race relations in the South, her position as a woman, and class identity to argue that she was a victim of circumstance and that she simply did what the status quo told her to do. All of her life, whites had been more dominant that anybody of her own skin complexion, men had more power than women and people of the upper tiers of social hierarchy had more control than anybody else. There was nothing to make Rivers feel like anything was wrong. These were all just the way things went. But Jones however, shies away from the relationship that Rivers had with the white male physicians who had much more power and authority than her. They began, on some …show more content…
They then were given aspirin and iron to cure what was then called “bad blood.” This was a local term that could have meant a variety of things including a variety of sexually transmitted diseases, anemia and even simple fatigue. This is where a question of ethics has to come into play. The doctors from the PHS very well knew what the men participating in the study had contracted, and to “gather information” they not only allowed it to go untreated, but did not tell the men what they had, the effects of what they had and for most of the study’s existence, a viable treatment for the disease (penicillin) existed and the PHS simply did not use it. But to understand the severity of what those doctors did with the assistance of Nurse Rivers, you have to understand exactly what syphilis is and what it does to the human body. Syphilis is an extremely contagious disease that is brought about by the Treponema pallidum. This delicate organism that closely resembles a corkscrew is either transmitted from one person to another by entering the body through the skin or mucous membrane (usually through sexual intercourse and sometimes kissing); or it is congenital and is passed from a mother to a child. From the beginning of infection, the disease affects tissues throughout the entire body. While in these tissues, the disease begins to multiply at an incredibly dangerous