Past Archive

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Another Look at Unethical Medicine

By Amy Thibodeau, May 31, 2010, 10:41 pm in Medicine, Past

Tuskegee is a small city in Alabama, which has played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement. It still houses Tuskegee University, which began as the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington; it is also where Rosa Parks was born. Sadly, it is also the location of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

According to Tuskegee University, it all began in the 1920s when a Chicago-based charity approached the government via the Public Health Service (PHS) with some ideas for improving the health of African Americans. The PHS had a special interest in addressing Syphilis as they’d recently completed a study that showed that upwards of 25% of a 2,000 person sample were afflicted with it.

Although the study may have began with good intentions, it shifted from being about helping those afflicted with the disease to becoming a study about the effects of untreated Syphilis on live patients.

the time of the project, African Americans had almost no access to medical care. For many participants, the examination by the PHS physician was the first health examination they had ever received. Along with free health examinations, food and transportation were supplied to participants. Thus, it was not difficult to recruit African American men as participants in the study. Burial stipends were used to get permission from family members to perform autopsies on study participants. (source)

You can imagine where they went with this. With a captive audience of living subjects at their disposal, the PHS made the horrifying decision that in order to study the disease in living patients they would not disclose the illness and instead would watch as patients slowly deteriorated and eventually died from it. In some cases, they even prevented subjects from receiving treatment from other sources: “During World War II, about 50 of the study subjects were ordered by their draft boards to undergo treatment for syphilis. The PHS requested that the draft boards exclude study subjects from the requirement for treatment. The draft boards agreed.” (source)

Unbelievably, this study continued until the late 1970s. When the director of the PHS department responsible for the study between 1943 and 1948 was interviewed in 1981 he admitted, “The men’s status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical material, not sick people.” (source)

Further reading: Henrietta Lacks and the Tragic Story of Medical Ethics, Racial Politics and Health Care Reform in America.

Image: Disease by Erik Starck

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Why are the East of Cities usually Poorer?

By Dan Zambonini, May 31, 2010, 1:10 am in Architecture, Culture, History, Past

Smoke / Pollution

Many older cities rapidly expanded during the Industrial Revolution, as workers flocked to the urban centers. As the towns and cities expanded, the residential areas for the workers tended to be in the east, with the middle and upper-classes in the west.

The reason for this is that in much of the northern hemisphere, the prevailing winds are westerlies – blowing from west to east. The massive, unchecked pollution from these early industries would therefore drift eastward, making the air quality much lower in the east end of cities, lowering the desirability (and price) of the housing. Middle classes preferred the cleaner west ends.

The issue was probably even pre-Industrial Revolution, as smoke from personal chimneys would still have caused problems to the east.

In many cities, this will have been compounded – or confused – by the direction of the main river in the environment, which would have been relied on for many uses, including sewerage. London, as an example, displays a massive east/west divide, caused in large part by both early industry and the west-to-east flow of the River Thames.

Smoke image under Creative Commons license, by Flickr user Señor Codo

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Noah Webster – ‘Father’ of the American Copyright System

By Amy Thibodeau, May 14, 2010, 7:47 pm in Culture, Language, Past

Noah Webster is best known for his role in cementing a distinct American culture through his changes to English language conventions and spelling following the American Revolution. Webster believed in that in order to prosper as an independent nation, America needed to embrace a culture distinct from its British colonial roots. He set about contributing to this by adapting the spelling of common words and including around 12,000 new words into his dictionary, which is now the standard in use across the USA. Major grammar and spelling changes attributed to Webster include changing most words with an -our ending in British spelling (i.e. honour) to an -or spelling in America (i.e. honor); he also changed most -ise word endings (i.e. apologise) to have -ize endings (i.e. apologize).

Although Webster borrowed liberally from the popular British-convention dictionaries of his time, once he had created and published his own opus, he wanted to protect his intellectual property. Webster was mainly concerned with publishers who, at the time, were permitted to reprint entire books without seeking the permission of the author and without providing them with any compensation.

In the 1700s the Federal government of the United States did not hold a lot of oversight over laws in the various states and the area of copyright was no exception. As such, when he began campaigning for copyright protection for his books, he was told he would have to seek protection in each independent state. In large part, due to his campaigning, under the new American constitution passed in 1789, the Federal government was granted greater oversight over the states, which enabled it to pass the first Federal copyright act one year later.

Webster continued to work for better copyright legislation for the rest of his life. His efforts were rewarded in the 1830-1831 congressional session … [when] the new law granted protection of the author or his heirs for 28 years, with the right of renewal for another 14 years. (source)

This new law remained in effect until 1909, long after Webster’s death.

Unlike current copyright legislation, which tends to be driven by big industry and is often enacted against the individual, Webster’s vision of copyright was one that protected artists against the publishing industry, which sought to profit off their work without compensating them. Webster’s law does not address or consider punishing individuals who seek to share and use intellectual property for non-profit purposes. As one source notes, Webster “might with more justice be termed the “father of royalties,” as he was one of the first to exact payment from his publishers according to the number of books they printed or that he licensed to them.” (source)

I wonder how Webster would feel about the various copyright battles being fought around the world today?

Image Credit: Noah Webster engraving via Wikipedia Commons

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Eccentric Torments – The Glass Delusion

By Amy Thibodeau, May 11, 2010, 2:43 am in Books, Medicine, Past

I am in the thick of reading Brian Dillon’s excellent book Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives. There is an interesting passage on an imagined affliction I’ve never heard of before:

In the history of such eccentric torments, none is stranger or more instructive than the so-called ‘glass delusion’. From the late Middle Ages onwards, this remarkably specific and consistent notion appears time and again in the literature on melancholia and hypochondria. The patient, as the reader will have surmised, fantacies that he or she is made of glass, either in part or in whole. (In a series of related delusions, patients may imagine that they have lost limbs, that they have been turned into animals, that they are dead, that they do no exist or, as in the case of an unforuntae baker who was afraid to go near his oven, that they are made of butter.) This has predicatable consequences: the ‘glass man’ fears for his physical safety, avoiding not only hard knocks but in some cases any touch at all from another person, as well as such delicate operations as sitting or lying down. The broad outlines of the delusion – imagining that one is made of a brittle substance – were not unknown to antiquity: classical accounts of earthenware men abound, but the spread of glass in the Early Modern period brought with it the possibility of thinking oneself made of less sturdy stuff …

The book features famous hypochondriacs including Darwin, Florence Nightengale, Charlotte Bronte and Andy Warhol, with a particular focus on the specific kind of craziness so completely epitomized by the Victorians. It’s a very interesting read.

Image: Broken Glass by Davetoaster

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Hard Men/Soft Deaths – Wyatt Earp

By Amy Thibodeau, May 8, 2010, 11:59 pm in Culture, History, Past

Despite the expression “what comes around, goes around” there are a group of outlaws who had surprisingly soft endings, despite having lived extremely hard, dangerous and, in most cases, crime ridden lives.

During his eighty years of life, Wyatt Earp earned the reputation as one of the most fearsome cowboys in the West. Fluctuating between legitimate lawmaker and criminal, Earp’s claim to fame is his participation in the famous gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona and his ongoing series of vendettas, most notably the Earp Vendetta, also referred to as the Arizona war. At various points in his career, Earp also worked as a “farmer, teamster, buffalo hunter, gambler, saloon-keeper, minder and boxing referee.” (source)

There are conflicting records of how many people Earp killed during his wild old days, but there are some records that place the number somewhere between eight and over thirty (source):

  • Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 1900: “Wyatt Earp is credited with ten men, one of them his own brother-in-law.”
  • G. W. Caldwell in the introduction to his interview with Wyatt, 1888: “[Wyatt Earp] Has killed more than a dozen stage robbers, murderers, and cattle thieves.”
  • Los Angeles Tribune, July 1888: “[Wyatt] Earp has a cemetery which he has stocked with over 30 men, and no one seemed desirous of questioning his word.”

Despite his life of debauchery, Earp had a rather peaceful death in Hollywood where, at the age of 80, he died at home of prostate cancer (though the actual cause of death isn’t confirmed) with his common law wife at his side. He had a proper funeral with Hollywood Western actors serving as his pallbearers and was cremated and buried in California. When his wife Josie died nearly twenty years later, she was also cremated, her ashes buried next to those of Wyatt Earp. He never returned to Arizona after the battle at the OK Corral.

Image Credit: Richard Beal’s Blog

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