Medical Intervention: Only When It's Convenient For The Doctors

Often medical intervention is seen as necessary, the proper way of handling deviancy and disease. However, the doctors involved in the Tuskegee experiment declined to offer treatment to the suffering individuals. If medical intervention is seen as necessary within many circumstances, such as in cases of conjoined twins, why was it that they chose not to intervene medically and provide treatment? Even when treatment options were made aware to the doctors, such as penicillin, doctors chose not to employ these treatment options. Wouldn’t offering treatment still have made for a reliable and informative experiment? Sure, they wouldn’t have been able to study the effects if left untreated completely, but they could have examined the effects if left untreated for a significant amount of time and how the treatment option was able to combat those effects.

One question which I can’t help but find myself exploring is whether or not they avoided medical intervention in an attempt to ultimately rid society of a “diseased and deviant” race. Therefore, by eliminating a great majority of the “diseased and deviant” race, the prevalence rate of syphilis may cease to exist. Or did they chose not to intervene and provide treatment simply to have a pool of disease to study from and be able to provide treatment to others (i.e. white individuals)? It is interesting, too, how doctors seem to exercise discretion about what medical cases require intervention and what ones do not. Does medical intervention seem to only be required and appropriate when it is making an individual less “deviant” and more closer to the ideal, the “normative?” Consider how intersex individuals are treated. Do they experience the pressure to medical intervene and undergo “corrective” surgery simply so that they can possibly achieve the ideal and fit within the binaries of sex/gender? I think the Tuskegee experiment offers interesting insight in the way in which science, medicine, and societal beliefs are intertwined and influence one another.

Angela B.