Allan M. Brandt wrote this article, “Racism and Research: The Case Study of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study” to assert the Tuskegee Study in a historical context and he wanted to relate it to the ethical implications that were seen in the twentieth century. The syphilis study that is being talked about was a study that included 400 syphilitic black men. There was also another 200 black men that were unaffected and served as a control. The issue that Brandt reveals is that when penicillin, the drug that treat syphilis, was revealed in the early 1950s, these 400 black men were not given the treatment. This study went from 1932 to 1972. Brandt wants to know why the study continued for forty years until the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare(HEW)
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I relate this towards our class because Brandt describes discrimination as an unequal treatment of a group or person towards another group or person. “Doctors usually discounted socioeconomic explanations of the state of black health, arguing that better medical care could not alter the evolutionary scheme” (Brandt Pg.68). This is a perfect example of discrimination used by Brandt because of the doctor’s prejudice on blacks as a whole, the doctors would discriminate against all blacks no matter their social standing. Therefore, the doctors would give equal treatment to a black man with high economic standing and a black man with low economic standing, making all blacks at the same level of status. The biggest issue I had with discrimination in the study of the black men with syphilis was that white people that had the disease was able to receive penicillin, but the black males were not able to get treated. The doctors showed prejudice on the group but discriminated against them because they thought the black males were not going to react in the same way that the white males did, therefore the doctors denied the black men treatment. In my understanding I believe that discrimination was Brandt’s main focus on the fact that none of the men that were being tested were being discriminated against and the doctor’s built prejudice based on how those black men or test subjects would react to the way they were treated. I gained a better since of discrimination because of the relation that Brandt describes between discrimination and prejudice. You can never test a way an individual has prejudice, but you can test a group or person’s discrimination towards another
I relate this towards our class because Brandt describes discrimination as an unequal treatment of a group or person towards another group or person. “Doctors usually discounted socioeconomic explanations of the state of black health, arguing that better medical care could not alter the evolutionary scheme” (Brandt Pg.68). This is a perfect example of discrimination used by Brandt because of the doctor’s prejudice on blacks as a whole, the doctors would discriminate against all blacks no matter their social standing. Therefore, the doctors would give equal treatment to a black man with high economic standing and a black man with low economic standing, making all blacks at the same level of status. The biggest issue I had with discrimination in the study of the black men with syphilis was that white people that had the disease was able to receive penicillin, but the black males were not able to get treated. The doctors showed prejudice on the group but discriminated against them because they thought the black males were not going to react in the same way that the white males did, therefore the doctors denied the black men treatment. In my understanding I believe that discrimination was Brandt’s main focus on the fact that none of the men that were being tested were being discriminated against and the doctor’s built prejudice based on how those black men or test subjects would react to the way they were treated. I gained a better since of discrimination because of the relation that Brandt describes between discrimination and prejudice. You can never test a way an individual has prejudice, but you can test a group or person’s discrimination towards another