Um…“rural?” Am I wrong in remembering that all of the test subjects in that experiment were African-American, and while they may have been rural as well, it’s for their ethnicity, not their place of residence, that the study is “justly infamous?”
If they weren’t all black, I’d love to see a cite for that, and if they were all black, why not mention that? “Rural” seems oddly vague and disingenuous. I mean, I’ve now seen “urban” and “rural” both used as euphemisms for “black,” which is kind of a problem.
It’s rare for any of these threads to run more than a page or two, so for cross-pollination of ideas, efficiency and more easy location of related discussions in any later search, my own preference is to keep all discussion of a single Cecil column or Staff Report in a single thread. YMMV.
The study is infamous. I didn’t need any help to know that the subjects were African-American, and neither did you, so I think that the adjective is stylistic rather than informative.
Personally, I thought it was infamous because the participants were not offered effective medical treatment after it became available part way through the study. But that reflects a medical viewpoint. I understand that African-Americans take the view you offered: it’s infamous because it was done to African-Americans. Either way, it’s infamous.
Given that the study is infamous and that the adjective is stylistic, I think it was stylistically valid to use an adjective illustrating another aspect of the study.
I mean, we all know the subjects were African-American, we all know they were actively denied appropriate treatment, what else can you say? You can say that they were rural.
What were the prevailing mores and ethics of medical research in the days when that study was done? If the study had become widely publicized even while it was being run, what degree of public outrage and infamy would have arisen, and why?
I’m going to speculate that the ethics of the day didn’t care too terribly much about doing dangerous research on unknowing subjects. But to the extent that anybody cared about that, I’m going to guess that there would have been some outrage about subjecting poor black people to it. If they had done the study with prisoners instead, probably nobody would have cared.
The study started as an ethical study (by the standards of the day). Participants were offered largely ineffectual treatment for a disease that had no effective treatment. They received benefits including free minimal medical care, but no attempt was made at “informed” consent or medical education.
It became unethical when effective treatement became available, which was actively denied to the uninformed subjects. But it didn’t stop then.
It only stopped when the experience of the Holocaust had the effect of raising standards for informed consent and medical responsibility.
If it had been publicised at the point it became unethical, the subjects would have pulled out, the study would have collapsed, it would never have become notorious.
