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The story of medicine throughout history can be dark, messy, and riddled with gruesome events. The never-ending journey towards more developed and perfected healthcare has inevitably seen its fair share of honest mistakes, but not every atrocity committed in the name of medicine and science was an accident. There are many horrible stories of those tasked with the preservation of humanity intentionally destroying entire groups of people, sometimes under the thin veil of the "greater good," and sometimes out of general disregard. This was rarely more apparent than in the Tuskegee Experiment, a 40-year ordeal that involved 400 Black men against their will and without their knowledge in a study of the long-term effects of untreated syphilis.

Intrigued? Then read on to learn about one of the darkest chapters of medical history in the United States.

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The dark and entirely unethical Tuskegee Experiment was by no means the first instance of medical racism in the United States, nor was it the last.

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Since the first boat of enslaved human beings arrived in the United States in 1619, the powers of American white supremacy loaded everything heavy, unpleasant, and painful onto their stolen shoulders. Not only labor, but also in the name of science and 'healthcare.'

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Experimental operations, dangerous surgeries, and long-term studies were commonplace during the age of slavery, through the Jim Crow era, and even during the civil rights movement.

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One of the most infamous figures in American medicine was James Marion Sims. Considered the father of modern gynecology, Sims, his beliefs, and his experiments immediately crumble and fall into the shadow of violence and depravity when under modern scrutiny. Sims was widely known to perform extremely painful and invasive gynecological exploratory surgeries and operations on enslaved women whom he had bought for the express purpose of experimentation. Sims also showcased his racist and uneducated scientific beliefs by claiming African Americans didn't feel pain in the same way he or his white patients did, and therefore there was no need to apply anesthesia. Sims' statue in Central Park was taken down in 2018 after years of public outcry.

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The story of eugenics in America is long and dreadful, and only began to come to a close in the wake of World War II, when the public began to see the striking similarities between American eugenics and Nazi eugenics. Forced sterilization was a primary tool of eugenicists, who hoped to rid the world of anyone deemed inferior. The term "inferior" was applied on broad, sweeping strokes to non-whites, certain religions, neurodivergent individuals, and countless psychological conditions.

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Michigan's Ionia State Hospital has gone down in history as one of the darkest places in the United States. Even for 20th-century asylums, Ionia State Hospital was a truly terrifying place, especially for the African Americans who made up most of its population. During the relatively recent 1960s, African Americans admitted to the psychiatric hospital with strong views regarding the civil rights movement were erroneously diagnosed with schizophrenia. This would often turn a short visit of an otherwise healthy individual into an extended, sometimes years-long stay in the asylum, essentially equating to false imprisonment.

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Another unethical study on the effects of STDs like syphilis and gonorrhea carried out by the United States government occurred in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948. There, professionals with the United States Public Health Service intentionally infected over 1,300 people, mostly soldiers, orphans, and various institutionalized demographics, with painful and dangerous STDs like gonorrhea, chancroid, and syphilis. Many people around the world, especially in Guatemala, consider this study a crime against humanity.

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During the Cold War, when warfare experiments were given the utmost priority in the United States and abroad, the American government once again chose African-American citizens as their test subjects. In 1955, the military released no less than 300,000 yellow fever mosquitos into the mostly Black city of Savannah, Georgia, to see how useful they could be in an entomological attack against actual enemies. Although officials have claimed the mosquitos were uninfected, dozens of Savannah residents fell dangerously sick during the test.

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The list of unethical, covert, and racially motivated medical practices in American history goes on and on. However, the most famous, and certainly the most prolonged of the events, is the 40-year-long Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

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Syphilis is a transmitted infection that can take many forms, some of which are deadly. Some infections can remain latent and asymptomatic for a person's entire life, while other infections can produce large and painful sores not only on one's exterior, but on one's organs as well, leading to a painful death.

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In 2015, out of the 45.5 million global syphilis infections, 107,00 of those people died from syphilis or complications from syphilis. Syphilis can also be passed on to fetuses in the womb in the form of congenital syphilis. Some 40% of fetuses infected with congenital syphilis will be stillborn, or die within their first year of life.

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Syphilis has been around since at least the 15th century, where it spread through the French troops of Europe. Back then, poisonous mercury was considered a miracle medicine. Syphilis patients were commonly placed into a fumigation stove and subjected to massive amounts of mercury vapor. But not only did the mercury not cure syphilis, it caused extremely painful side effects that often led to death.

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The long-term effects of syphilis had only barely been studied before the 20th century. In 1928, physicians in Oslo published the 'Oslo Study of Untreated Syphilis,' a retrospective study of syphilis on patients who had naturally become infected.

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After the publishing of the Oslo findings, physicians in the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) in Alabama decided to conduct a prospective study on syphilis in order to expand on the Oslo study. This study would be conducted at the Tuskegee Institute, the famous historically Black college founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881.

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The county surrounding Tuskegee, Macon County, had been the land of plantations before the American Civil War. Since the abolition of slavery, the area had become sharecropper country. Countless landless sharecroppers of all races toiled in the cotton and tobacco fields for little, if any, money.

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The study saw many architects and leaders come and go throughout its 40-year history, but there are a few who stand out. The head of the USPHS, Taliaferro Clark, is credited with conceiving of and establishing the study, but it was locally led by Raymond A. Vonderlehr (pictured right), future director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). When Vonderlehr left in 1943, his position was filled by John Heller Jr. (pictured left). Another central figure, the only person to be involved with the experiment from start to finish, was nurse Eunice Rivers (pictured center). Rivers served as the functional link between the USPHS and the Black community of Macon County. She was responsible for gaining the trust of hundreds of participants and keeping track of them over the decades, although it is unknown how much she knew about the study's true purposes.

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The USPHS attracted over 600 poor Black men, mostly sharecroppers, from all around Macon County to participate. Not a single 'volunteer' was told the true nature of the study.

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The USPHS, along with the help of Eunice Rivers and other Tuskegee Institute staff who may or may not have understood what they were helping with, advertised free medical consultations and treatments, as well as free transport to and from the Institute. It was an irresistible offer for many of the destitute farmers, for whom proper healthcare had never once been a real possibility.

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The 600 participants were told they were to be treated for "bad blood." Of those 600 men, 399 were infected with syphilis, while 201 constituted a healthy, uninfected control group.

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Neither group was told the fate of the other; they had no idea they were separated in groups at all. The participating physicians would regularly see and examine their patients, claiming to be treating them, but really doing nothing but taking notes.

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Doctors treated the syphilis-infected men with just about anything that wouldn't actually affect the syphilis. Extremely painful and invasive spinal taps were regularly taken in order to study the unsuspecting patients' spinal fluid.

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As the various effects of syphilis began to rear their ugly heads, the Tuskegee clinicians continued to treat the various symptoms of "bad blood" with placebos. Those with serious infections began going blind, developing sores, suffering from heart disease, and even succumbing to insanity; still, it all went untreated.

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In order to preserve the efficacy of their study, the USPHS had to ensure their research subjects didn't find outside help for their ailments. Information about syphilis and its available treatments were completely withheld from the unwitting participants.

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Many medical professionals inside and outside of the USPHS voiced their concerns regarding the ethics of the Tuskegee Experiment. Proponents of the study maintained that their work would have an ultimately positive effect on humanity, even if some lives were ruined in the process.

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It would be an enormous task to try to sell this line of thinking to the hundreds of individuals and families affected, and just as hard to justify the experiment in a modern court. Forty years of unexplained ailments, from painful sores and sudden blindness to psychosis and death, could have been easily treated, not to mention avoided altogether.

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It was only 11 years after the start of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that experts discovered the value of penicillin in treating syphilis. The questionable practices of treating the infection with mercury and other dangerous substances immediately took a backseat to safe and viable penicillin treatment in 1943. This incredible medical breakthrough quickly put an end to the Tuskegee architects' quest for a cure for syphilis, but the experiment continued for another 29 years nonetheless. Information about penicillin was carefully withheld from the Tuskegee subjects.

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When the United States entered World War II at the end of 1941, 256 Tuskegee patients were drafted and examined by doctors outside of the study. They were quickly diagnosed with syphilis and ordered to seek treatment, but the USPHS stepped in to remove all of their names from the draft list so that their research could continue. Back under the 'care' of Tuskegee clinicians, the withholding of life-saving treatment continued.

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Decades of scattered complaints regarding the Tuskegee Experiment came to a head in 1972 when Associated Press journalist Jean Heller (pictured third from left) broke the story nationwide. Members of Congress, who were only then hearing of the Tuskegee Experiment for the first time, quickly organized a special group to examine and ultimately terminate the experiment. Over 100 men lost their lives by the time the Tuskegee Syphilis Study came to an end.

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All in all, 28 men died directly from syphilis, 100 more perished from syphilis-related complications, 40 of the subjects' wives contracted syphilis, and 19 children contracted congenital syphilis; almost all of the infants died as a result. The NAACP filed a lawsuit in 1974, which concluded with the United States government paying US$10 million in damages, as well as granting the survivors and their family free healthcare.

Sources: (History) (CDC)