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FILE 069 · VOL XII · They Rehearsed This
They Called It Bad Blood. The File That Came After Was Worse.
Some books are a debt. They are paid by telling. They grow by selling.
Based on: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Intake record
| Recovered from | Donated archive boxes, a county historical society, Macon County, Alabama |
|---|---|
| Contents | A Public Health Service follow-up register (1946), a family Bible, a check stub, a hospital discharge form |
| Finder | Renee Whitfield, volunteer archivist |
| Status | Register returned to the family. See archivist's note. |
| On the record | Real history is cited with numbered sources. Everything else, use your own judgment. |
Recovered file
You never talked about it. Mama says you only said one thing about it in your whole life, at the kitchen table in 1972 when it was on the news. You said: "They called it bad blood. It wasn't my blood that was bad."
I know the story now. Everybody in Macon County knows it. Starting in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service followed about six hundred Black men here, most of them sharecroppers. About four hundred of them had syphilis. They were told they were being treated for "bad blood." They were not treated. They were watched. Even after penicillin became the standard cure in the 1940s, the government kept watching, to see what the disease would do to a man's body over a lifetime. [1]
It went on for forty years. It ended in 1972 only because a man named Peter Buxtun, who worked for the Public Health Service, kept complaining and finally went to the press. In 1997, President Clinton apologized at the White House to the eight survivors who were still alive. [1]
You were not one of them. You died in 1990. I am writing to you anyway.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 069 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.