enth century were southerns who believed in the existing social order. They justified slavery, and after its abolition, second-class citizenship by insisting that blacks ere incapable of assuming any higher station in life...here different unquestionably meant inferior. Thus, medical discourses on the peculiarities of blacks offered, among other things, a psudoscientific rationale for keeping blacks in their places (Jones 17).Jones discusses the racial attitudes that help to sustain this study. White physicians and scientist shared in the prevalent racism that saturated the United States especialy the South. Many of the white physicians involved were convinced that syphilis was a black disease and that it was more prevaleent among blacks then whites. Jones concludes, whether by accident or design, physicians had come dangerously close to dipicting the syphilitic black as the represenative black (Jones 28).To deny that race played a role in the Tuskegee study is naive. All 600 subjects (399 experimantals and 201 controls) were Black. The officials in charge of the study failed to obtain informed consent from the subjects in a study of a disease with known risk to human life. little respect was shown to the subjects. The reseachers were not compelled to explain to the men whatexactly was occurring to them. The reasearchers were evidently never troubled by any ethical questions raised by the study of this nature. Denying the men salvarsan or mercury in the 1930s, current treatments for syphilis during this time, or penicillin after is was discovered and identified as a cure for syphilis in the 1940s.By failing to obtain informed consent and offering incentives for participation, it is quite obvious that the PHS doctors were performing unethical annd immoral experiment on human subjects. From the moment the experiment begun, the immorality of the experiment was blatantly apparent. Instead of obtaining consent from the parti...
