Reverby’s Perspective in the Story of the Tuskegee Study
A historical understanding of events is paramount to policy making. The story of “Tuskegee” Syphilis study was full of exaggeration, more than medical experiment could carry. When this story circulated, it presented many mythical overhauls. The Public Health Service doctors who conducted the study examined the course of the acquired and untreated late prevalent illness in hundreds of African American men. These doctors offered some level of treatment for the first few months in 1932 before everything went out of control. The next period of the treatment revealed that even heavy metal treatment attempts and penicillin failed to offer the desired cure for syphilis. Much melodrama suggests that the doctors became negligent and discretely infected the men through injecting them with the bacteria that cause syphilis. Reverby in her book and lectures attempted to change this perspective through paralleling reality and rumour. She weighed the two and brought a sense in the whole story of exaggeration about the study.
According to Reverby, researchers that wished to demystify the melodrama of intentional infection for purposes of study could acknowledge that even myths have some level of truth. Even though, intentional infection of people with the disease may appear like a myth, it holds some truth. They supported this assertion by quoting an oral historian, Alessandro Portelli. This historian argues that the story gives an opportunity to identify the interests of storytellers, their dreams and desires embedded in their story. Similarly, these researchers could also acknowledge that individuals who had a belief in the intentional infection were confusing the analysis with those undertaken by researchers from America in the 1960s and 1970s (Reverby Lecture). The confusion was that the American researchers offered stories of radical medical analysts that injected cancer cells in elderly Jewish patients. History also reveals that these medical researchers availed live hepatitis cells orally and through injections to mental retarded children (Reverby Lecture). This was in violation of the ethical aspect of the public health service.
Culture and the level of civilization determine the intensity of possible syphilis infections.Reverby tried to change people’s point of view through drawing reference to cultural collaboration. She said that the imagination that these men had infections impacted strongly into the socio-cultural collective awareness’ fears of testing.There were in addition,legal precedents that gave the state the power to do what it thought necessary to presever the public’s health, even against the will of individuals (Reverby143) .This perspective avoids identification of the unreasonable correspondents’ sexual engagement. This could emerge from the participants’ parental activities because syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease. Reverby asserts that the worsening of racism could be by the assumption of men in the study on infection other than being under surveillance for a number of years.
“Their lack of evidence and scientificbasis for their claims ranged from malarias to vaguely “racial influences” interfering with the diseases development. Only one physician from New Orleans noted that “central nervous system syphilis isn’t rare in the colored; in fact. It is almost as prevelant in our clinics as in the whites” (Reverby Lecture 54)
From a different perspective, Reverby claimed that the consideration with the dangers of penicillin hindered some of its efficiency, particularly for patients who were at least twenty years out from syphilis infection (Reverby Lecture). It was imperative for historians to stress on medical understanding of stages of development of the disease as well as its transmission. She gave a discussion of multiple stages of the illness, when and how decisions concerning treatment of latent stage victims. She asserts that even though the doctors had an intention to infect the patients with syphilis, it was hard to attain their objective outside sexual contact, breastfeeding or through the mother to her child.
The causes of syphilis and consequent spreads were a significant aspect of her research. Reverby also acquired a hereditary prospective and established that the transmission of syphilis was not from one generation to another through genes(Reverby Lecture). As a result, there was a need to explain why doctors simply could not inject the spirochetal bacteria that caused syphilis from one individual’s blood to another. She argued that research points to lack possibility in finding experimental means of recreating the disease in healthy people. This is because the culturing of Bacteria and development is impossible in the laboratory. However, she acknowledged that it takes time and commitment to understand medical science, standard public health practices, and cultural beliefs that explain why the PHS did not infect these men.
In her analysis, Reverby draws reference from the work of Dr. John C. Cutler, done between 1946 and 1948. His reputation in the field of sexually transmitted diseases gave him an initiative in carrying out research into the Guatemala story. He had a dedication to examining and conquering diseases whose transmission was through sexual contact and offered contraception for women. He asserts that an exploration of what happened in the Tuskegee study provides an insight into the ethical considerations of the public health service researchers. There was a strong attraction of the need for knowledge in science. This made the analyse of the melodrama impossible with difficulty in establishing the truth.
Work Cited
Reverby, Susan M. Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Print
