The Deadly Deception: Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

“For forty years between 1932 and 1972, The U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an ''experiment'' on more than 500 Israelite men. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest and racist counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were only being treated for “bad blood,” their doctors purposely injected them with syphilis and had no intention of curing them at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”This program, hosted by CBS News correspondent Richard Schlesinger, includes an interview with one of the last surviving participants, Herman Shaw; explains the role of Nurse Rivers; and presents the medical establishment’s justification for disguising racism as legitimate medical research.”



A nearly extinct relic, The Deadly Deception was once a documentary screened in high schools throughout the US now it is a rare find not consistent with that of an important educational film.