Rating: 
Summary: Landmark worth reading
Review: The "study" of the natural history of syphilis in black men is important to understand. Because it involved US federal funds and US federal researchers, it was a key demonstration that serious ethical problems in research were a mainstream event rather than a fringe problem; awareness of this project fueled concern for regulatory oversight and led to the development of federal regulations. James Jones' revelations were key to this process, and everyone involved in human subjects' research should read this book. Overall, the book is well researched and well presented. One of the more frightening aspects of Tuskegee is subtle, and doesn't get as thorough a treatment as it could have; that is, some of the outrageous features of the project were not the result of single outrageous decisions, but were rather the sum of many smaller errors. These are harder for a researcher to dismiss as things s/he could never have done. As a physician, I can comfortably say that I would never deliberately deny effective therapy to someone with a serious illness. But I can not as glibly say that I would have been the one to stand up and rebel when a protocol committee in the late 1940s or early 1950s decided that the evidence for penicillin's effectiveness in advanced syphilis was not QUITE good enough to mandate terminating the project. There are also some rough spots in some of the technical information, most glaringly a rather startlingly inaccurate description of what's involved in a spinal tap. Those are small issues, though. Overall, this is an excellent book that makes it abundantly clear why Tuskegee is so important to our thinking about research ethics, and helps the reader understand why certain racial and ethnic groups have a distrust of medical research.
Rating: 
Summary: An agonizing read of medical irresponsibility
Review: This book is probably one of the first of the expose type to zero in on medical culpability in the US. Most people tend to think that only Germany was capable of doing the atrocities that occurred during WWII. It was these atrocities that led to the Nuremburg Code of conduct for physicians and scientists, yet it was known prior to the Germans butchery that other countries including the US and England were equally responsible for using human beings for questionable experiments. As a student in medical school I came across references to this book and others like it. My interest lay in the fact that as a Deaf person, I know what it is like to have doctors treat me with disrespect and patronizingly. I started researching into how lack of education leads to people being taken advantage of by the medical establishment. In my research, so many referred back to this particular book, I decided I just had to read it. Not only have I read it but I have lent it to others who share my concern that there are medical practitioners out there like Kervorkian who would have no problem putting to death or using for unethical experiments, people who they view as less than people. Jones did a magnificent job of research and follow-up with those involved in this horrible fiasco. Not only were these doctors racist, but they considered anyone with lower education to be only as useful as animals...to an extent they treated these men with less care and concern then they treat animals used in experiments today. Jones was more than fair, including reasons for why these doctors and nurses, both black and white, did not perceive this long on-going experiment as being wrong. It is partially due to his exposure of this experiment, that other minority groups including the disabled are looking carefully at the medical establishment for bias and prejudice, for neglect and outright denial of fair medical treatment and availability of treatment. Every medical student, public health student, science student, educator, and frankly everyone should read this book. I am deeply concerned that if we don't pay attention to the ethics of all the new science and medical information being found, we will once again allow someone somewhere in our nation the opportunity to use a particular group of people for their own unethical purposes. We cannot afford to turn a 'blind' eye to this happening again. Karen L. Sadler, Science Education, University of Pittsburgh, klsst23@pitt.edu
Rating:
Summary: A Shocking Medical Experiment in the American South
Review: This book was excellent and informative. However, readers should know that it is written in a research style, almost like a text book (sometimes putting the reader to sleep-and the reason I am only rating it four stars), as opposed to being written by an investigative reporter (and reading like a thriller). The book is extremely well documented. The author was intimately involved with helping lawyer Gray (Rosa Parks' lawyer) prosecute the case against the federal government, by providing much of the documentation given in this book. He began work on the book while a student in Harvard's bioethics program in 1972, and only subsequently becoming involved with lawyer Gray.The book is a complete history from the conception of the experiment, until its termination, including the viewpoints of ALL participants. In addition to learning about the experiment itself, I learned a lot about life in the rural American South, which I had not previously known, and a lot about the disease of syphilis that I hadn't known. Some examples: I didn't know that 30-40 percent of blacks in the rural South were infected, nor that the disease crosses the placental barrier, which caused a lot of syphilitic babies. The book includes pictures of syphilitic skin lesions, and discusses multiple complications of the late stages of the disease. The book also delves into the moral and racial issues extensively. There is an updated chapter at the end comparing the syphilis crisis to the AIDS crisis, and discusses why so many blacks are distrustful of doctors and hospitals-this experiment simply being one of the most recent examples of how this segment of our society as lied to, and taken advantage of. What was MOST shocking to me about this book was that I was born in 1955, and this experiment continued into the mid-1970's. The FIRST time it was questioned on moral grounds was about 1962, and throughout the 60's, most doctors did not even QUESTION the morality! The story was broken the same day as Sargent Shiver's having obtained psychiatric counseling-the latter story I heard about extensively, and the former not at all! Before buying this book, I had never even heard of this medical experiment, and I just can't believe things like this were taking place IN
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA until the mid-1970's!!!
Rating:
Summary: A Shocking Medical Experiment in the American South
Review: This book was excellent and informative. However, readers should know that it is written in a research style, almost like a text book (sometimes putting the reader to sleep-and the reason I am only rating it four stars), as opposed to being written by an investigative reporter (and reading like a thriller). The book is extremely well documented. The author was intimately involved with helping lawyer Gray (Rosa Parks' lawyer) prosecute the case against the federal government, by providing much of the documentation given in this book. He began work on the book while a student in Harvard's bioethics program in 1972, and only subsequently becoming involved with lawyer Gray. The book is a complete history from the conception of the experiment, until its termination, including the viewpoints of ALL participants. In addition to learning about the experiment itself, I learned a lot about life in the rural American South, which I had not previously known, and a lot about the disease of syphilis that I hadn't known. Some examples: I didn't know that 30-40 percent of blacks in the rural South were infected, nor that the disease crosses the placental barrier, which caused a lot of syphilitic babies. The book includes pictures of syphilitic skin lesions, and discusses multiple complications of the late stages of the disease. The book also delves into the moral and racial issues extensively. There is an updated chapter at the end comparing the syphilis crisis to the AIDS crisis, and discusses why so many blacks are distrustful of doctors and hospitals-this experiment simply being one of the most recent examples of how this segment of our society as lied to, and taken advantage of. What was MOST shocking to me about this book was that I was born in 1955, and this experiment continued into the mid-1970's. The FIRST time it was questioned on moral grounds was about 1962, and throughout the 60's, most doctors did not even QUESTION the morality! The story was broken the same day as Sargent Shiver's having obtained psychiatric counseling-the latter story I heard about extensively, and the former not at all! Before buying this book, I had never even heard of this medical experiment, and I just can't believe things like this were taking place IN
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA until the mid-1970's!!!
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