Excerpt:
Imagine that you're a poor person living during hard economic times. Your government offers you free medical care. Sounds good. But what if the real reason you're approached is because you have a disease. But instead of giving you medical care, the doctors are really just watching what happens when this disease goes untreated. Suppose a miracle then happens and a treatment is found for your disease. Instead of giving you the new medicine, the doctors continue the experiment of watching the disease go untreated. Years pass, some of your friends who were also in the study die, some pass the disease to their wives and children.
Annotation:
This exercise has students read various articles on the U.S. Public Health Services's Tuskegee Study of the impact of syphilis on African Americans in the 1930s. To gain an understanding, students will look at several aspects of the Tuskegee Study and then focus on other topics that have been compared to it. The task is to thoroughly understand key issues involved in the Study, analyze articles that compare other tragedies to the Tuskegee Study, and, finally, write critiques to the authors of the articles. This lesson is from Pacific Bell's Knowledge Network Explorer site.