in the tuskegee syphilis experiments what information did researchers

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Tuskegee Experiment: The Infamous Syphilis Study

By: Elizabeth Nix

Updated: June 13, 2023 | Original: May 16, 2017

The Tuskegee experiment began in 1932, at a time when there was no known cure for syphilis, a contagious venereal disease. After being recruited by the promise of free medical care, 600 African American men in Macon County, Alabama were enrolled in the project, which aimed to study the full progression of the disease.

The participants were primarily sharecroppers, and many had never before visited a doctor. Doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), which was running the study, informed the participants—399 men with latent syphilis and a control group of 201 others who were free of the disease—they were being treated for bad blood, a term commonly used in the area at the time to refer to a variety of ailments.

The men were monitored by health workers but only given placebos such as aspirin and mineral supplements, despite the fact that penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis in 1947, some 15 years into the study. PHS researchers convinced local physicians in Macon County not to treat the participants, and instead, research was done at the Tuskegee Institute. (Now called Tuskegee University, the school was founded in 1881 with Booker T. Washington as its first teacher.)

In order to track the disease’s full progression, researchers provided no effective care as the men died, went blind or insane or experienced other severe health problems due to their untreated syphilis.

In the mid-1960s, a PHS venereal disease investigator in San Francisco named Peter Buxton found out about the Tuskegee study and expressed his concerns to his superiors that it was unethical. In response, PHS officials formed a committee to review the study but ultimately opted to continue it—with the goal of tracking the participants until all had died, autopsies were performed and the project data could be analyzed.

Buxton then leaked the story to a reporter friend, who passed it on to a fellow reporter, Jean Heller of the Associated Press. Heller broke the story in July 1972, prompting public outrage and forcing the study to finally shut down.

By that time, 28 participants had perished from syphilis, 100 more had passed away from related complications, at least 40 spouses had been diagnosed with it and the disease had been passed to 19 children at birth.

In 1973, Congress held hearings on the Tuskegee experiments, and the following year the study’s surviving participants, along with the heirs of those who died, received a $10 million out-of-court settlement. Additionally, new guidelines were issued to protect human subjects in U.S. government-funded research projects.

As a result of the Tuskegee experiment, many African Americans developed a lingering, deep mistrust of public health officials and vaccines. In part to foster racial healing, President Bill Clinton issued a 1997 apology, stating, “The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong… It is not only in remembering that shameful past that we can make amends and repair our nation, but it is in remembering that past that we can build a better present and a better future.”

During his apology, Clinton announced plans for the establishment of Tuskegee University’s National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care .

The final study participant passed away in 2004.

Tuskegee wasn't the only unethical syphilis study. In 2010, then- President Barack Obama and other federal officials apologized for another U.S.-sponsored experiment, conducted decades earlier in Guatemala. In that study, from 1946 to 1948, nearly 700 men and women—prisoners, soldiers and mental patients—were intentionally infected with syphilis (hundreds more people were exposed to other sexually transmitted diseases as part of the study) without their knowledge or consent.

The purpose of the study was to determine whether penicillin could prevent, not just cure, syphilis infection. Some of those who became infected never received medical treatment. The results of the study, which took place with the cooperation of Guatemalan government officials, were never published. The American public health researcher in charge of the project, Dr. John Cutler, went on to become a lead researcher in the Tuskegee experiments.

Following Cutler’s death in 2003, historian Susan Reverby uncovered the records of the Guatemala experiments while doing research related to the Tuskegee study. She shared her findings with U.S. government officials in 2010. Soon afterward, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius issued an apology for the STD study and President Obama called the Guatemalan president to apologize for the experiments.

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About the USPHS Syphilis Study

Where the Study Took Place

The study took place in Macon County, Alabama, the county seat of Tuskegee referred to as the "Black Belt" because of its rich soil and vast number of black sharecroppers who were the economic backbone of the region. The research itself took place on the campus of Tuskegee Institute.

What it Was Designed to Find Out

The intent of the study was to record the natural history of syphilis in Black people. The study was called the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male." When the study was initiated there were no proven treatments for the disease. Researchers told the men participating in the study that they were to be treated for "bad blood." This term was used locally by people to describe a host of diagnosable ailments including but not limited to anemia, fatigue, and syphilis.

Who Were the Participants

 A total of 600 men were enrolled in the study. Of this group 399, who had syphilis were a part of the experimental group and 201 were control subjects. Most of the men were poor and illiterate sharecroppers from the county.

What the Men Received in Exchange for Participation

The men were offered what most Negroes could only dream of in terms of medical care and survivors insurance. They were enticed and enrolled in the study with incentives including: medical exams, rides to and from the clinics, meals on examination days, free treatment for minor ailments and guarantees that provisions would be made after their deaths in terms of burial stipends paid to their survivors.

Treatment Withheld

There were no proven treatments for syphilis when the study began. When penicillin became the standard treatment for the disease in 1947 the medicine was withheld as a part of the treatment for both the experimental group and control group.

How/Why the Study Ended

On July 25, 1972 Jean Heller of the Associated Press broke the story that appeared simultaneously both in New York and Washington, that there had been a 40-year nontherapeutic experiment called "a study" on the effects of untreated syphilis on Black men in the rural south.

Between the start of the study in 1932 and 1947, the date when penicillin was determined as a cure for the disease, dozens of men had died and their wives, children and untold number of others had been infected. This set into motion international public outcry and a series of actions initiated by U.S. federal agencies. The Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs appointed an Ad Hoc Advisory Panel, comprised of nine members from the fields of health administration, medicine, law, religion, education, etc. to review the study.

While the panel concluded that the men participated in the study freely, agreeing to the examinations and treatments, there was evidence that scientific research protocol routinely applied to human subjects was either ignored or deeply flawed to ensure the safety and well-being of the men involved. Specifically, the men were never told about or offered the research procedure called informed consent. Researchers had not informed the men of the actual name of the study, i.e. "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," its purpose, and potential consequences of the treatment or non-treatment that they would receive during the study. The men never knew of the debilitating and life threatening consequences of the treatments they were to receive, the impact on their wives, girlfriends, and children they may have conceived once involved in the research. The panel also concluded that there were no choices given to the participants to quit the study when penicillin became available as a treatment and cure for syphilis.

Reviewing the results of the research the panel concluded that the study was "ethically unjustified." The panel articulated all of the above findings in October of 1972 and then one month later the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs officially declared the end of the Tuskegee Study.

Class-Action Suit

In the summer of 1973, Attorney Fred Gray filed a class-action suit on behalf of the men in the study, their wives, children and families. It ended a settlement giving more than $9 million to the study participants.

The Role of the US Public Health Service

In the beginning of the 20th Century, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) was entrusted with the responsibility to monitor, identify trends in the heath of the citizenry, and develop interventions to treat disease, ailments and negative trends adversely impacting the health and wellness of Americans. It was organized into sections and divisions including one devoted to venereal diseases. All sections of the PHS conducted scientific research involving human beings. The research standards were for their times adequate, by comparison to today's standards dramatically different and influenced by the professional and personal biases of the people leading the PHS. Scientists believed that few people outside of the scientific community could comprehend the complexities of research from the nature of the scientific experiments to the consent involved in becoming a research subject. These sentiments were particularly true about the poor and uneducated Black community.

The PHS began working with Tuskegee Institute in 1932 to study hundreds of black men with syphilis from Macon County, Alabama.

Compensation for Participants

As part of the class-action suit settlement, the U.S. government promised to provide a range of free services to the survivors of the study, their wives, widows, and children. All living participants became immediately entitled to free medical and burial services. These services were provided by the Tuskegee Health Benefit Program, which was and continues to be administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in their National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention.

1996 Tuskegee Legacy Committee

In February of 1994 at the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library in Charlottesville, VA, a symposium was held entitled "Doing Bad in the Name of Good?: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study and Its Legacy." Resulting from this gathering was the creation of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee which met for the first time in January 18th & 19th of 1996.  The committee had two goals; (1) to persuade President Clinton to apologize on behalf of the government for the atrocities of the study and (2) to develop a strategy to address the damages of the study to the psyche of African-Americans and others about the ethical behavior of government-led research; rebuilding the reputation of Tuskegee through public education about the study, developing a clearinghouse on the ethics of scientific research and scholarship and assembling training programs for health care providers. After intensive discussions, the Committee's final report in May of 1996 urged President Clinton to apologize for the emotional, medical, research and psychological damage of the study. On May 16th at a White House ceremony attended by the men, members of the Legacy Committee and others representing the medical and research communities, the apology was delivered to the surviving participants of the study and families of the deceased.

What Newly Digitized Records Reveal About the Tuskegee Syphilis Study

The archival trove chronicles the extreme measures administrators took to ensure Black sharecroppers did not receive treatment for the venereal disease

Caitjan Gainty, The Conversation

In 1972, a whistleblower revealed that the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) had withheld syphilis treatment from hundreds of Black men as part of a 40-year study observing the natural course of the disease. The experiment’s subjects—the majority of whom were sharecroppers from rural Alabama—believed they were undergoing treatment for “bad blood,” a colloquial name then used for a host of conditions, including venereal diseases. Instead, they received placebos and inadequate medical care, even after penicillin emerged as an effective, readily available treatment for syphilis in the mid-1940s.

The Tuskegee syphilis study , as the experiment is often called today, began in 1932 with the recruitment of 600 Black men, 399 with syphilis and 201 without, to serve as the control group. Initially intended to run for six months, the study continued for decades. Unwitting participants lured in by the promise of free medical care, hot meals and burial insurance returned regularly for aspirin, tonics, blood draws and the occasional spinal tap. But none of these treatments does any good for syphilis, and 128 of the men ultimately died of the disease or complications related to it.

When news of the study broke, Chuck Stone , a journalist and former Tuskegee Airman , responded with an impassioned editorial, writing, “It either takes a tough constitution or a rancid morality to sit quietly by and watch 200 men die without doing anything about it. I call it genocide. Have you got a better name for it?”

Historians have had decades to pore over the study’s archives. Now, the National Library of Medicine has made a collection of those documents available for public viewing online . Anyone with an internet connection can read the primary source material—hundreds of pages of administrative records, letters and meeting minutes.

No one would expect the portrait this collection paints to be pretty or redemptive. Indeed, the study has gone down in the annals of American history as one of the most notorious, but by no means only, examples of medicine at its most prejudicial, virulent and unethical. Even with this knowledge, it is galling to read about the lengths USPHS doctors went to to ensure their patients were denied treatment.

Immobile and malleable

A 1948 history of the study makes it clear that the choice to set the experiment in the Deep South was deliberate. As the paper notes, the study followed a broader survey of syphilis in the still deeply segregated region. Sponsored by the Julius Rosenwald Fund , this earlier program aimed to assess the prevalence of the disease in several Southern counties and make sensible plans for its treatment—a starkly different goal than the Tuskegee experiment. The USPHS drew on this data to identify Macon County, Alabama, the surveyed area with the highest prevalence rate of syphilis, as the right place for a new study. Macon County also had high poverty rates and low education rates, ensuring the experiment’s subjects would be both immobile and malleable.

Another contributing factor was the presence of the venerable Tuskegee University, a historically Black college then known as the Tuskegee Institute, which had the facilities necessary to carry out the autopsies and lab work the study required.

Always a hurdle was a 1927 Alabama state statute that required medical personnel to report and treat all cases of syphilis. But enforcement of this statute was so lax that the experiment could have continued unimpeded had it not been for the 1942 draft, which led the local Selective Service Board to unmask the syphilitic status of the study’s subjects. The board’s charge was to evaluate individuals for military service, a process that required testing for venereal diseases and mandatory treatment for those affected.

R.A. Vonderlehr, the assistant surgeon general and one of the originators of the study, jumped into action to prevent the subjects from receiving treatment. He wrote urgently to local health officer Murray Smith, asking him to pull some strings to get the study subjects exempted.

“I would suggest that you confer with the chairman of the local Selective Service Board,” Vonderlehr wrote. “I believe he is an old friend of yours, and I would inform him of all the circumstances connected with the study. It is entirely probable that … he will cooperate with you in the completion of the investigation.”

Smith made good use of his social connections, managing to get the 256 remaining syphilitic subjects exempted from treatment. Likewise, when the same matter reached D.G. Gill, director of the Alabama Department of Health’s Bureau of Preventable Diseases, he requested Vonderlehr’s advice on whether to “make an exception of these few individuals” to avoid “encroaching on some of your study material.”

Effective treatment denied

Even in the postwar period, when penicillin became widely available, replacing the arguably ineffective and dangerous arsenic-based syphilis treatments that had preceded it, the study ploughed ahead , still more committed to documenting the disease than treating its sufferers. There was nothing unwitting about this denial of treatment.

Indeed, the archive shows that subjects were explicitly and repeatedly lied to for decades so they wouldn’t seek treatment for syphilis on their own. Even the form letters they received bore the hallmarks of a scam. They were invited to a “special examination” with government doctors waiting to give them “special attention” to “find out how you have been feeling and whether the treatment has improved your health.” Some of these notes were signed by Smith, who was designated just below his signature as a “special expert” to the USPHS.

And then there were the spinal taps , which were widely hated by the study subjects for the severe headaches they caused and because the men worried the procedure “robbed [them] of their procreative powers (regardless of the fact that I claim it stimulates them),” wrote physician Austin V. Deibert in a 1939 letter to Vonderlehr. 

Deibert told Vonderlehr the USPHS might have to  cancel the spinal taps  for the sake of the study’s continuation. “All in all and with no attempt at humor,” he said, he was the one with the real “headache.”

Neither World War II nor the early civil rights movement seemed to move the subsequent generations of study staff and administrators. The study was widely known in medical circles, thanks to the dozen or so articles on its findings published in prominent journals. Though outsiders started criticizing the experiment in the 1950s and ’60s, these dissenting voices were few and far between.

The first confirmed critique of the study from outside the USPHS arrived in a 1955 letter written by physician Count Gibson , who had heard a USPHS official explicitly state that the study’s subjects were not informed that treatment was being withheld.

Though Gibson was reportedly unsatisfied with the response he received, his colleagues urged him not to pursue the issue for fear that speaking out against these very powerful men might jeopardize his own career. He let it drop. In 1964, cardiologist Irwin Schatz voiced similar concerns, writing a letter that also questioned the study’s ethics. He never received a reply.

Concerns waved off

Indeed, the study directors continued to wave off concerns. As a set of meeting minutes from 1965 put it, “Racial issue was mentioned briefly. Will not affect the study. Any questions can be handled by saying these people were at the point that therapy would no longer help them. They are getting better medical care than they would under any other circumstances.”

In 1970, Anne R. Yobs, a co-author of one of the published papers, acknowledged that the research should come to an end. In a letter to the director of the Centers for Disease Control, she recommended closing the study, not because the charges of racism and unethical practice that had started to pour in were merited, but rather because “changes at the program level … in sensitivity to (potential) criticism” had forced administrators’ hands.

The study had become “an increasingly emotionally charged subject,” preventing “a rational appraisal of the situation,” wrote James B. Lucas, assistant chief of the USPHS’ Venereal Disease Branch, in a memo that same year.

By 1972, Peter Buxtun , a USPHS venereal disease officer who had spoken out against the study within the organization for years to no avail, had had enough. He went to the press.

Jean Heller, an Associated Press journalist, broke the story that July. A few months later, an ad hoc committee organized to evaluate the study finally ended it .

The Tuskegee study’s legacy has reverberated across the decades. In 1974, the NAACP successfully sued the federal government for $10 million, distributing the settlement money to the study subjects and their surviving family members. In 1997, President Bill Clinton publicly apologized to the men, acknowledging that what the USPHS had done was “deeply, profoundly, morally wrong.”

The study has had a material impact on medical outcomes within the African American community more broadly. Over the past several decades, researchers have connected the experiment to lower life expectancy among Black men due to broken trust in the health care system. More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent vaccination efforts reignited discussions around Tuskegee’s impact on medical mistrust . Susan Reverby, the preeminent historian of the Tuskegee syphilis study, argues that the experiment’s legacy is far more complex than commonly stated, in no small part because of how it has been viewed historically. She notes that tying medical skepticism directly to Tuskegee erroneously suggests that the “reason for mistrust happened a long time ago,” thus turning attention away from the structural racism of today. As historian Alice Dreger succinctly puts it, “African Americans who distrust the health care system see plenty of reasons all around them to do so. They don’t have to look back 40 years.”

Perhaps, in this light, the most important takeaway from these digitized documents is not the starkly racist, unethical enterprise they so vividly record. It’s easy to condemn Vonderlehr, Smith, Yobs, Deibert and the countless others in the story whose actions are deeply troubling. But it’s more useful to observe how professional credentials and networks, philanthropic funding, warped notions of the greater good, and devotion to the scientific method provide cover to racism—and even prop it up. For it is often in these more quotidian spaces of life that racism in medicine persists .

This article is published in partnership with the Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the Conversation’s version .

Caitjan Gainty is a historian of 20th-century medicine and technology at King’s College London. She initially trained in public health and worked for several years in health care research before returning to academia to pursue a PhD in the history of medicine, which she received in 2012.

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Digitized Document Collection from USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee Now Publicly Available Through NLM

Leaders from the Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation, descendants of the men who were treated unethically in the study, visit with NIH leadership in September 2023 to view contents of the physical collection before the release of the digitized collection.

A collection of reproduced documents from the 1932 study by the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) on the effects of untreated syphilis in Black men at Tuskegee Institute is now available as a digitized collection through the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee was conducted without informed consent and led to major reforms to protect participants in biomedical research. The digitized collection, which can be viewed as part of NLM’s Digital Collections , was made possible through permission from Fisk University, Nashville, a historically Black university, which holds a portion of original documents at the John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives. NLM is part of the National Institutes of Health. NIH has worked with Fisk University to make these important documents, previously only available in their physical form, more broadly available to ensure this chapter in history is never repeated and build greater trust in current biomedical research through transparency.

The USPHS is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS and its divisions, including NIH, take very seriously our responsibility to ensure the ethical conduct of the studies we support. Additionally, HHS established the Office for Human Research Protections to provide leadership in the protection of the rights, welfare, and wellbeing of those involved in HHS-conducted or -supported human research. HHS and its divisions have built mechanisms into our review, funding, and management of projects to ensure that research participants are protected and that a study like the USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee will never happen again.

The collection, which consists of more than 3,000 reproduced copies of correspondence, memoranda, meeting minutes, reports, and scientific articles, constitutes a distinct historical record that has informed research led by historians, medical ethicists, and many others across a variety of disciplines. NLM’s stewardship of this collection supports its mission to enable biomedical research and support health care and public health through free online access to scholarly biomedical literature.

About the Study

Cover page of meeting minutes from the Ad Hoc Advisory Panel held on February 23, 1973, superimposed over an image of a Black participant in the study included in the NLM’s digital collection.

In 1932, a study began on the effects of untreated syphilis on Black men in Alabama. Researchers conducting the study did not obtain informed consent from participants and did not offer treatment, even after it was widely available. In 1972, an ad hoc federal panel was created to investigate the study. The final report found the study to be ethically unjustified and that participants were not informed about the nature of the disease and given treatment once a highly effective treatment was found. In 1972, the study officially ended after advisement from the panel. The investigation and its subsequent findings led to compensation for victims of the research and major changes in research practices.

In 1973, Dr. R.C. Backus, Executive Secretary of the Ad Hoc Advisory Panel, donated to NLM photocopies of the original documents on the origin, development, and investigation of the USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee. In making this collection more widely available, NIH is recognizing the participants in the USPHS study and the injustices they and their families suffered. NIH also recognizes the work of the Ad Hoc Advisory Panel to address the unethical actions of the study which ushered in new protections for the rights of research participants.

The NLM collects, preserves, and makes publicly available collections such as that of the USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee to advance open access, improve transparency in research, and ensure that lessons of the past inform the present and future of biomedical research, health care, public health, and healthy behavior. View NLM’s YouTube video and Circulating Now post to learn more about the USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee.

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Public Health Service Study of Untreated Syphilis at Tuskegee and Macon County, AL

In 1932, 399 African American men in Tuskegee and Macon County, Alabama were enrolled in a Public Health Service study on the long-term effects of untreated syphilis . At that time, there was no cure for syphilis, though many ineffective and often harmful treatments, such as arsenic, were used. In the 1940s, penicillin was discovered, and by the 1950s, it was widely accepted by the medical community as the quickest and most effective treatment for syphilis . The men in the study were not made aware of the availability of penicillin as treatment, however, and the study continued and was transferred to CDC along with the PHS VD Unit in 1957.

The study was intended to last only six months but continued into the 1970s. In 1968, Peter Buxton, a CDC Public Health Advisor in the USPHS, raised questions about the study. After several years of questioning by Mr. Buxton, several news articles were published, leading to a Senate investigation headed by Sen. Edward Kennedy. It was this investigation that forced the study’s end in 1972. CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)  acknowledged the study as unethical, ended it, and compensated study survivors for medical care and burial expenses.

Shown above is a letter that then-CDC Director Dr. David J. Sencer wrote to the survivors of the U.S. Public Health Service Study of Untreated Syphilis at Tuskegee and Macon County, AL explaining that they would receive medical care for the rest of their lives. Also on display is one of the benefits cards that was distributed, which reads, “To Serve Those Who Served,” as well as a photograph of President Clinton with the survivors at the White House, where on May 16th, 1997, he officially apologized to the last living participants.

Out of this tragedy came the  Belmont Report , a comprehensive document that created new standards of research to protect participants from unethical practices.

For more information, including the names of the men in the study, please visit Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation (voicesforfathers.org)   and Tuskegee Study and Health Benefit Program – CDC – OS .

Take a closer look:

• What is syphilis and how does it spread? Learn more about syphilis  and the bacterium that causes the disease, Treponema pallidum .
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Then and now:

• Learn more about incidence, prevalence, and cost of STIs over time in the U.S.
• Read about CDC’s STD prevention success stories .
• View a timeline of the Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee and learn how this study informed ethical data collection and changed research practices  for good.
• Explore the history of traveling and sexually transmitted diseases in this  EID issue .
• Learn about preventing antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea  and CDC measures to combat antibiotic resistance  across the U.S.
• Contemplate the impact of the Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee on affected families .
• Read about nurse Eunice Rivers , the nurse who worked on the Tuskegee Study.

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National Archives at Atlanta

U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee

The USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee began in 1929 as a cooperative study involving the USPHS, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and state and local health departments in six southern states. During the study, a number of Black men in Tuskegee (Macon County), AL, with syphilis were left untreated, but were observed, studied, and compared to a control group which did not have the disease. The study continued until the 1970s when its existence was revealed to the public, resulting in Department of Health Education and Welfare and Congressional hearings on the ethics of medical experiments on human subjects.

This photograph depicts one of the doctors who worked with the USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee drawing blood from one of the participants. Learn more about the individuals involved in this study by viewing the index .

Photograph of Participants in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, undated. National Archives Identifier: 956091

View in National Archives Catalog

View and download the photograph of a participant of the USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee  in the National Archives Catalog. This photograph is one example of the many records held at the National Archives at Atlanta, GA. You can explore more of our holdings by visiting our online  Catalog  or by visiting the  National Archives at Atlanta . This record is located within  Record Group 442: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , Series: Tuskegee Syphilis Study Administrative Records, 1929–1972 . Many of the records in this collection have yet to be digitized. We encourage researchers to visit us onsite to explore these records and learn more about the archival collections held in the National Archives at Atlanta.