Abstract
This essay rethinks the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments in light of a long history of experimentation in plantation geographies of the U.S. South. Turning to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses of the New South and to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, this essay illuminates the extension of the laboratory life of the plantation into the twentieth century. The focus on personal hygiene at the Tuskegee Institute opened the door for alliances with public health initiatives early on, making the school’s student population as well as residents of surrounding counties subjects of intense hygienic surveillance well before the official start of the syphilis study.
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Notes
Vonderlehr et al., “Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro.”
Ibid, 856.
Ibid.
See, for example, Deibert and Bruyere, “Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro.”
See Brandt, “Racism and Research,” 18. Brandt outlines the distinctions between an experiment and a “study in nature,” as put forward by the French physiologist Claude Bernard in 1865. While a study in nature requires only observation, an experiment involves intervention into the conditions of the study. Brandt concludes that Tuskegee was clearly an experiment.
Vonderlehr et al., 856.
Pesare et al., “Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro,” 202. In a 1954 article, the authors note, “geographic isolation was a factor in favoring the unchanging nature of the group.” See Olansky et al., “Environmental Factors in the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis,” 693. As the study continued, researchers became worried about the increased mobility of the experimental group. See, for example, Schuman et al., “Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro.”
Bullard, Dumping in Dixie. Bullard has linked environmental devastation in the South with the region’s former “marriage to slavery and the plantation system, which exploited both humans and the land.” He writes, “the region became a ‘sacrifice zone,’ a sump for the rest of the nation’s toxic waste. A colonial mentality exists in the South, where local government and big business take advantage of people who are politically and economically powerless” (97).
Cassedy, “Medical Men and the Ecology of the Old South,” 172.
These specific directions to planters came from the Southern physician John Douglass. Ibid, 171.
Silber, The Romance of Reunion, 68.
Ibid, 4.
Ellison, “The Inland Waterways of the South,” The Annals, 114.
Jordan, “Cotton in Southern Agricultural Economy,” The Annals, 5.
See Smith, African American Environmental Thought, 2.
Poe, “Agricultural Revolution A Necessity,” The Annals, 45.
Washington, “The Negro’s Part in Southern Development,” The Annals, 124–133.
Ibid, 133; italics are mine.
Ibid, 125.
Stone, “The Negro and Agricultural Development,” The Annals, 14.
Ibid, 13.
In Working Cures, Sharla Fett argues that plantation owners attended to slave ailments in terms of soundness. See Chapter 1
See Baker, Turning South Again, 81.
Local residents colloquially referred to the Institute as “Mr. Washington’s Plantation.” Baker notes this as does Harlan in Booker T. Washington. Washington was also derisively called the “Wizard of Tuskegee” by some of his contemporaries.
Washington, Up From Slavery, 19.
Wexler, Tender Violence, 149.
Washington, Up From Slavery, 64.
Ibid, 65.
Wells, “Up From Savagery,” 66. Wells’ thinking on “colonial purity” is indebted to Anne McClintock’s work on the role commodity fetishes like toothbrushes and soap played in the maintenance of racial difference and colonial order in the nineteenth-century British metropole. See McClintock, Imperial Leather.
Quoted in Harlan, 114.
“Working with the hands” is a reference to Washington’s 1904 sequel to Up From Slavery. See Washington, Working With the Hands.
Washington, Up From Slavery, 81.
The Exposition address is reprinted in Chapter XIV of Up From Slavery, 142–154.
Washington, Working With the Hands, 16; italics are Washington’s.
Ibid, 144; italics are mine.
Ibid, 145.
See, for example, Harlan’s Booker T. Washington. In Schooling for the New Slavery, Donald Spivey documents the hostility of students, and sometimes even faculty and staff to Washington’s impossible expectations. Spivey’s recognition is an important intervention: where studies of Washington (including this one) so often emphasize the control and mastery Washington wielded over his institution, he reveals the forms of everyday struggle that resisted Tuskegee’s control of bodies, habits, and movement. Spivey reports that during the last ten years of Washington’s leadership at Tuskegee, faculty feared that students were armed and ready to attack. In 1903, students even waged a strike based on their objections to the rigid order at the school.
Washington, Up From Slavery, 115.
Washington, Working With the Hands, 29.
Washington, Up From Slavery, 115, 118.
See Kowalski, “No Excuses for Our Dirt,” 182.
Washington, Up From Slavery, 59.
Ibid, 107.
Douglas, Purity and Danger.
Ibid, xvii.
Ibid, 2.
Cassedy notes that after the Civil War, Northern observers like Frederick Olmstead worried that abandoned and rotting structures on plantations would breed disease. It is important to note that yellow fever tended to break out with greater frequency in commercial, urban areas and was less of a concern on more rural plantations. On the history of yellow fever and its role in the development of Public Health, see Humphreys, Yellow Fever in the South.
By Southern Public Health Movement I mean to include local efforts by Southerners themselves, both black and white, as well as Northern philanthropic or governmental programs.
See Kenney, “Health Problems of the Negroes.”
Kenrick Ian Grandison has shown that Tuskegee’s “natural” boundaries of trees strategically hid the school from the hyper-vigilant gaze of Macon County locals.
Dr. Kenney of the Tuskegee Institute writes of the visits: “The smallest details are looked after, as how to prepare and serve their food, how and when to bathe, how to ventilate their houses, how to care for their hair, the washing of their clothing, cleaning their teeth, sleeping between sheets, and all such subjects as tend to improve their home conditions. The special subjects of tuberculosis and typhoid fever have been discussed before the people in the most elementary manner possible” (364). See Kenney, “Health Problems of the Negroes.”
On the social hygiene movement, see Simmons, “African Americans and Sexual Victorianism in the Social Hygiene Movement, 1910–40.”
Ferguson, “Of Our Normative Strivings,” 90.
Ibid, 89.
For a more comprehensive overview of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment than I am able to offer here, see Susan Reverby’s edited collection, Tuskegee’s Truths. The older, and still very helpful, study is James H. Jones’ 1981 Bad Blood.
On the involvement of the Rosenwald Fund in the therapeutic stages of the 1929 Syphilis Survey, see Ascoli, Julius Rosenwald, 314. It should be noted that by 1929 the Fund was being run by Edwin Embree, who was especially enthusiastic about directing money to health initiatives in the South and to research in the social sciences. Rosenwald, who passed away in 1932, had taken a backseat in the organization’s operations by this time. However, the Fund’s early involvement in the Syphilis Survey still reflects and extends upon Rosenwald’s longtime philanthropic interest in African American education and health in the South.
The control group consisted of around 200 men. The exact number in the experimental and control groups is unclear since researchers placed some subjects from the control group into the experimental group after they had become infected or were discovered to have already had syphilis. See “Selections from the Final Report of the Ad Hoc Tuskegee Syphilis Study Panel,” in Reverby, Tuskegee’s Truths, 165.
The burial costs were subsidized through the Milbank Fund, another major Northern philanthropy.
Harlan, 141; Ascoli, 143.
Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation, vii.
Ibid, 187.
Olansky et al., “Environmental Factors in the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis.”
Johnson, xv.
Ibid.
Roy, “The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.”
Ibid, 299.
Ibid, 313.
Baker, 96.
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I would like to thank Luka Arsenjuk, Cathy Davidson, Michelle Koerner, Russ Leo, David Miller, Priscilla Wald, and the two anonymous readers at JMH for their helpful suggestions and comments on this essay.
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Rusert, B. “A Study in Nature”: The Tuskegee Experiments and the New South Plantation. J Med Humanit 30, 155–171 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-009-9086-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-009-9086-4