Connect the Dots 101

“Irwin Schatz, 83, Rare Critic of Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Is Dead”

Nobody knows how many people read the December 1964 issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, but apparently only one, Dr. Irwin Schatz, was so appalled by one of its articles, about a syphilis experiment using uneducated black men in Tuskegee, Ala., that he wrote the study’s author to protest.

“I couldn’t believe what I had read,” Dr. Schatz, who died on April 1, wrote in an email in 2013 to Civil Beat, an online newsletter in Hawaii, where he had moved to teach. “But the message was unmistakable.”

“These researchers had deliberately withheld treatment for this group of poor, uneducated, black sharecroppers,” he added, “in order to document what eventually might happen to them. I became incensed. How could physicians, who were trained first and foremost to do no harm, deliberately withhold curative treatment so they could understand the natural history of syphilis?”

www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/health/irwin-schatz-83-rare-critic-of-tuskegee-study-is-dead.html