The Search for the Legacy of the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee is a collection of essays from experts in a variety of fields seeking to redefine the legacy of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The essayists place the legacy of the study within the evolution of racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Contributors include two leading historians on the study, two former United States Surgeons General, and other prominent scholars from a wide range of fields.

Using the infamous research studies in Tuskegee and Guatemala, the article examines the difference between victims and bystanders. The victims can include families, sexual partners, and children not just the participants. There are also the bystanders in the populations who are affected, even vaguely, decades after the initial studies took place. Differing reparations for victims and bystanders through lawsuits and historical acknowledgments has to be part of broader discussions of historical justice, and the weighing of the impact of racism and (...) imperial research endeavors. (shrink)

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is surrounded by illuminating misconceptions—myths that cannot be blithely dismissed because they actually provide some insight into the significance of the study. One of those is that the men were deliberately infected with syphilis; another is that they obtained no treatment for the disease. Some other errors are alleged in two recent articles about the study, but these articles themselves create their own fictions.

BiDil, a drug approved in 2005 by the FDA only for African Americans, was seen by many as almost reparations for the horrors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study where treatment for black men was denied. The logic of race, however, rather than racism, links BiDil to the past many thought it was escaping.

The presence of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was palpable at the June 16, 2005, Food and Drug Administration’s Advisory Committee meeting on BiDil, a heart medication from the pharmaceutical company NitroMed that sought approval as the first race-specific drug. So ubiquitous is the restless and unsettled spirit of Tuskegee that it continues to hover over the African American public and the biomedical research/health care provider communities more than three and a half decades after the actual study “died.” No one invoked (...) the word “Tuskegee” in that dimly lit meeting room as BiDil gained the Advisory Committee’s approval. Yet its power was exerted even when it was not named. The FDA Committee’s chairman, Cleveland Clinic cardiology chief Steven Nissen, acknowledged this after the committee met: “We were putting [Tuskegee]…to rest.”. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War. By Susan E. Lederer.

Using 452 letters sent in 1990 to Wellesley College over a student petition objecting to the choice of Barbara Bush as the graduation speaker, this article explores how an attempt to expand the boundaries of elite women's political behavior created a cultural and symbolic battle that centered upon the content of education, women's “manners” and civility, and their implications for elite women's participation in the broader Hobbesian social contract for citizenship. The article demonstrates that social class in its gendered form (...) is essential to understanding the construction of citizenship. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War. By Susan E. Lederer.