In looking up more information on this topic in general. I came upon this [1] paper on the Tuskegee Study. It's an absolutely encyclopedic work that covers the

In looking up more information on this topic in general. I came upon this [1] paper on the Tuskegee Study. It's an absolutely encyclopedic work that covers the historical context, parallel programs, and much more with an absurd level of detail and sources galore. So for instance I also thought that no subjects in Tuskegee received penicillin. It turns out this is incorrect and by 1952 27.5% had! [2] Another really interesting datum is that Georgia in 1945 started carrying out widespread syphilis testing, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of people, reaching 89% testing coverage in one local jurisdiction (which is where I assume Tuskegee was located). The interesting thing is that 30% of black individuals and 3% of white individuals tested positive for syphilis. People wouldn't have known the exact numbers back when this the Tuskegee study started (in 1932), but with such ridiculously high rates of infection, they'd have had a general idea. How do you think that would shape your views of a people when the Overton Window was wide open? Do you honestly think you'd still have been standing on a moral pedestal? This is why I think it's important to try to do more than just demonize the people involved. Because demonizing them isn't hard. They deserve it, and worse. But at the same time when we demonize them, it's so easy to miss the lessons to be learned because, after all, we aren't demons so surely we couldn't go down the same path again. Yet we almost certainly will if the only lesson we take away is 'don't be evil', because what we see as evil after the fact is not what people, good normal and "moral" people, perceive to be evil in the present. That's history in a nutshell after all. [1] - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/224795 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... [2] - https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0021968155901533 https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art... (gotta love 70 year old papers being paywalled...)