The Milbank Memorial Fund and the US Public Health Service Study of Untreated Syphilis in Tuskegee A Short Historical Reassessment

• Published in: The Milbank quarterly Vol. 100; no. 2; pp. 327 - 340
• Main Author: REVERBY, SUSAN M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Wiley 01.06.2022; Blackwell Publishing Ltd; John Wiley and Sons Inc
• Subjects: African Americans; Commentary; Descendants; Financial Management; Health care; Health Services; History, 20th Century; Human Experimentation; Humans; Medical research; Money; Music; Obligations; Philanthropy; Presidents; Public health; Questions; Racism; Research ethics; Research subjects; Restorative justice; Rumors; Sexually transmitted diseases; Social media; STD; Syphilis; Syphilis - epidemiology; United States; United States Public Health Service; Websites; United States; United States > US
• ISSN: 0887-378X; 1468-0009; 1468-0009
• DOI: 10.1111/1468-0009.12574

May 2022 marked 25 years since President Bill Clinton’s federal apology for the US Public Health Service (PHS) Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro, better known as the Tuskegee Study, and this July marks the 50th anniversary of the Study’s widespread public exposure. Over the decades, the Study has become the symbol of American immoral research practices, racism in medicine, and the push that led to the 1979 Belmont Report and principles for ethical research in human subjects. In these COVID years, it is the reason often given for the mistrust of the health care system among African Americans. Histories, movies, plays, poems, music, thousands of articles, and endless rumors and social media accounts keep the Study’s story, fictional and nonfictional, circulating.1 Yet there is still more to learn and uncover as we plumb the historical record and ask contemporary questions. One of these concerns is why the Milbank Memorial Fund acceded to the PHS’s request for money in 1935 to support the Study and continued it for the next nearly four decades. In May 2021, the Milbank Memorial Fund asked me, as a medical historian who had written on what happened in Tuskegee, to research a series of questions of how and why the Fund became involved, what they did during the Study’s years, and then its aftermath. My work resulted in a long report now on the Fund’s website that uncovered new information on how the Study was sustained.2 My findings provide more insight into the Study’s longevity, why it was not stopped, and the nature of the government and philanthropic foundation relationship. This article is a short summary of my findings that can serve as an example of history as part of restorative justice, as the Fund now considers its moral obligations to the descendants of the men in the Study.