The Tuskegee Experiments
Additional Lecture To Be Announced
In this class we will explore the experiments done in and around Tuskegee, Alabama, by the US Public Health Service in the mid-20th century, in which 400 African-American men with syphilis were studied and prevented from being treated for almost 4 decades. We will consider the context in which the experiments were first designed, and who designed them. We will discuss who participated in running the experiments, and what caused them to finally come to an end. We look (and perhaps wonder) at why they went on for so long, even after the discovery of penicillin, the promulgation of international codes of ethics, and the Civil Rights movement. We will end by asking what relevance this history has for improving health care in the present context.
Joel Howell
Elizabeth Farrand Professor of the History of Medicine
Professor of History, Internal Medicine, and Health Management & Policy
University of Michigan
Joel Howell obtained his MD from the University of Chicago and his PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from 1984. He spends about half his time in the Medical School, where he is an attending physician, and half in the Department of History, where he teaches, including the history of medicine. His research focuses on trying to understand how and when we came to value (and perhaps overvalue) science and technology for patient care. He is also the Director of the Medical Arts Program, which uses the arts to attempt to improve patient care.