This whole story is shocking and hard to comprehend. I am
overwhelmed by the ignorant racism of the doctors and the leaders of the Study.
This “military outlook and willingness to condemn others to death” is represented
by their eagerness to finish their medical experiment without consideration for
the livelihood and wellbeing of their patients (135). The men, who led this
study to further the overall knowledge of syphilis, aimed to garner more
knowledge about syphilis despite how they treated their subjects. The doctors
and researchers called the men in the Study “subjects” not patients which
clearly exemplifies the fact that these doctors were not helping the men, they
were helping themselves.
The
poor conduction of the experiment or study threatens the legitimacy of the
results and conclusions derived from the observations and statistics which
renders the Study overall useless. Neglecting to follow the steps for
conducting an experiment, the doctors wasted their time and hurt their
“subjects” for no valid reason. They tried to say that martyrdom needs to
happen in medicine sometimes for results, but when I consider who the martyrs
of the study were, these African American men in Alabama, I realize that Clark
when he said this did not point to the fact that the martyrs never gave consent
or permission for them to be experimented on.
The Study
emphasizes the importance of bioethics, a term which I have never heard of before.
The ethics of medical research coalesced into the Belmont Report which regarded
three principles for researchers: “respect for persons, beneficence, and
justice – the founding beliefs for modern American bioethics” (192). It is hard
to believe that researchers before did not even consider that they were
respecting their subjects and those around them, and when it came to the
Nuremburg Code, the Tuskegee Experiment researchers did not apply to themselves
because those that conducted the Nuremberg research, “they were Nazis” (66).
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