How Black Prison Inmates in Philadelphia Were Turned Into Human Guinea Pigs: A Memoir

Tuskegee was hardly the last time American medical researchers used men in unethical experiments

By Allen M. Hornblum

It was while Peter Buxtun was working as a venereal-disease investigator for the Public Health Service in San Francisco in 1966 that he overheard a lunchtime conversation that would not only confound him but ultimately place him among the most important whistleblowers in American history.

A graduate of the University of Oregon and psychiatric medic in the army, Buxtun had taken a job as an investigator/interviewer tracking down the sex partners of those individuals determined to have contracted gonorrhea and syphilis. Returning to the coffee room of the clinic at 33 Hunt St. after lunch one day, he heard a senior officer tell two nurses of a strange story concerning a severely ill man in Alabama who had been taken by his family to a private physician for treatment. The doctor recognized the symptoms as tertiary syphilis and gave the man a shot of penicillin. After the visit, however, local PHS officials came down hard on the physician. They informed him the man was part of a special clinical investigation and should not have been treated.

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” recalled Buxtun. “It ran counter to everything I had learned as a venereal-disease worker. It’s not what our mission was.”

Perplexed that a legitimate clinical trial could preclude treatment to a sick, insane individual, Buxtun followed up with his own investigation and requested whatever material was available on this unusual nontreatment study in Macon County, Alabama. The package Buxtun received was shocking. Though hundreds of men had syphilis—they were told they had “bad blood”—all they were given was aspirin and tonic. Also included in the package were accounts of “roundups,” or the periodic collection and examination of the 400 syphilitic men in the study. PHS doctors were interested in charting the progress of the disease until the study’s final stage, autopsy. Buxtun was stunned by what he read, especially that all the subjects in the exercise were poor black sharecroppers.

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Source: Tablet Magazine