Tag Archive: public health
By Susan M. Reverby
The word “Tuskegee” in relationship to health care reminds Americans of the “infamous syphilis study” and that horrific medical experiments took place here, and not just in Nazi Germany. Between 1932 and 1972, the United States Public Health Service followed, but did not treat, hundreds of African American men in Alabama who already had late stage syphilis. The men never knew they were being watched as aspirins, iron tonics, and diagnostic spinal taps were explained as “treatment” and scores of them sickened and died.
In my most recent book, I had to explain: why did the doctors do it? Sometimes it is easy to answer this: all the men were black and poor, and almost all the doctors were white. Was this racism pure and simple? Or is this just scientific and governmental bureaucracy run amuck where having the power to do this just lets it go on and on?
Yes, of course, to these answers and then no. No because these public health physicians thought they were answering crucial questions: does race affect disease and do those with late latent syphilis need treatment? Many honestly believed their faulty data that assumed racial differences and ignored contrary evidence. They thought they proved “syphilis wasn’t such a bad disease” and then found that those who had survived into the antibiotic era (when penicillin could have made a difference) often got to other doctors for these drugs despite the study. The doctors allowed medical uncertainty about how to treat syphilis to be explained by racial assumptions and to see individuals as a population.
“Tuskegee” will probably continue to haunt our civic imaginations as a metaphor for malfeasance and hubris in research. The study should remind us both of the dangers of racism and the common practice of wrongly reading race into scientific data.
Susan M. Reverby is the McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of the UNC Press released Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy
and editor of Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. To read the UNC Press Blog, click here.
Grave site of Tuskegee participant, Lucious C. Pollard (from the author’s personal collection and book.)
By David S. Barnes
In the late summer of 1880, a wave of offensive odors descended upon the city of Paris. For just over two months, between late July and early October of that year, Parisians complained of the putrid, insufferable stench. The tone of many reactions was apocalyptic: “[T]he odors are truly unbearable”; “We’ve never seen anything like this!” “This can’t go on!”
Complaints came from all sides. … The press protested violently against the government’s negligence. … People approached one another with but one greeting: “Do you smell that? What a stench!” It was a real public calamity. Parisians were panic-stricken; public officials were anguished; cabinet ministers were troubled.
Medical authorities, journalists, and fearful residents all agreed that the odors brought with them the threat of deadly diseases. The chorus of popular protest was seconded by scientific authority, as a special commission composed of the nation’s leading medical scientists (including Louis Pasteur, the father of bacteriology) concluded that foul-smelling emanations were capable of transmitting the germs of contagious disease, and that “these odors which have spread over Paris … can pose a threat to the public health.”
Fifteen years later, the capital’s residents again found themselves beset by stench. “Fetid emanations,” “nauseating” and “disgusting” odors, “Paris again turning putrid”—the noisy complaints that began in early June 1895 sound like a reprise of August and September 1880.
Disgusted and indignant reactions to the odors of Paris again emphasized their intolerability and the urgent imperative of remedial action. As in 1880, the search for the culprits focused on the sewers and on suburban waste treatment plants, and once again local government officials were harshly criticized for inaction and complacency. Only the certainty of impending epidemics and the search for germs in the foul miasmas were missing from the public reaction in 1895.
David Barnes, author of The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs
, is a historian of medicine and public health who has taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 2002. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley.
IMAGE: City street-cleaning tanks dispense perfume instead of water. Caption: “A means of combating the odors of Paris.”
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