Abstract: The Julius Rosenwald Fund syphilis seroprevalence studies
Roy, B. Journal of the National Medical Association. 1996 May;88(5):
315-22.
ABSTRACT:
In 1929 the Julius Rosenwald Fund, in conjunction with the Public Health
Service (PHS), sponsored a syphilis seroprevalence study in the South
characterized as a humanitarian effort to benefit the health of rural
African Americans. The study reported extraordinarily high rates of
positive Wassermann tests, even among children. Despite the
unreliability and nonspecificity of this test, modern authors continue
to indict these subjects as syphilitic. However, there was no
consistent relationship between syphilis and a positive Wassermann
test. Additional treponemal pathogens that potentially caused
false-positive tests could explain the results. After public outcry to
the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the Rosenwald study acquired new
significance. It was used as evidence to bolster the argument that
Tuskegee was a consequence of humanitarian motives that became captive
to misguided methods of researchers at the Venereal Disease Division of
the PHS. Humanitarianism implies the acknowledgement of a right invested
in the recipient; health is an end in itself. However, African
Americans were necessary as a source of cheap labor for competition in
the world cotton markets and as a restraint on the market value of white
labor in manufacturing. The administrative structure of the PHS, not
zealous individuals, adopted utilitarianism as its paradigm for human
research. Syphilis seroprevalence was a calculated use of public health
as a means to economic development.
Return to Select Bibliography on the Tuskegee
Study.