cipants, the PHS offered the men incentives to participate: free physical examinations, free rides to and from the clinics, hot meals on examination days, free treatment for minor ailments, and a gurantee that a burial stipend would be paid to their survivors. This modest stipend of $50.00 represented the only form of burial insurance that many men had (153). When the subjects were administered painful lumbar punctures in 1933 ( commonly known as a spinal tap where a needle is driven into ones vertebrate and fluid is suctioned from the spinal cord, a procedure that exposed the patients paralysis or death) their cooperation was obtained under false pretenses. Dr. Vonderlehr, one of the leading reseachers in the study, wrote letters to each patient inviting him to a special experiment, adding that remember this is your last chance for special free treatment (Jones 127). The physicians continued to conceal the truth that this procedure was diagnostic rather than therapeutic by telling the patients that they were receiving spinal shots (Jones 127).To understand why so many black men welcomed the opportunity of receiving what appeared to be free health care, though they received bad treatment, one must understand the social and economic conditions of rural Macon County, Alabama at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Census of 1930 revealed that blacks made up 82 percent of Macons twent-seven thousand residents. Blacks outnumbered whites four to one and neraly half of the resisdents lived below poverty level. It was all to common to visit houses without indoor plumbing and no other means of water supply save a swallow well that occupied the same territory as that of sewage (Jones 61). The fifth chapter of Joness Bad Blood: The Tuskegge Syphillis Experiment entitled The Dr. Aint Taking Sticks describes the destitute environment in which Blacks lived: ...housing conditions were terrible. The typical dwelling was a tumble-down...
