James Jones' Bad Blood Is Certainly One Book Report

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James Jones' Bad Blood is certainly one of the most popular books to emerge from 1990s decade. The book can have a profoundly disconcerting impact on the readers but is definitely worth reading because of the well-researched contents. This book exposes the unethical behavior of government and medical community, which resulted in the death of hundreds of black men during a torturous government-sponsored Tuskegee Syphilis project which lasted 40 years and caused immense harm to poor illiterate African-American families.

The project that began in 1930s continued for 40 long years in which 400 black men with syphilis were studied by medical professionals who wanted to see how the diseases progressed in black men even though the..."germ that causes syphilis, the stages of the disease's development, and the complications that can result from untreated syphilis were all known to medical science."

The sheer brutality of the study was revealed when it was found that the experiment had absolutely no positive objectives. It was conducted just to see how syphilis affected black population and what were its effects on the subjects. The subjects or should we say victims of this project were not given any kind of treatment for syphilis during the time they were studied and the project came to an end with the autopsy of the last victim. Even though penicillin had been discovered in 1940s, the patients who could have benefited from it were not given any such medication because that was not the purpose of the study.

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Moreover, the experiment did not yield any positive results for discovery of new syphilis medicine neither did it help in discovering possible alternative treatment for infected patients. All in all, it was simply a cruel case of whites victimizing the blacks and even placed some African- American people in key positions to make the whole study look impartial and unbiased. Dr. Cummings, the then Surgeon General, nonchalantly remarked, "It is our desire to continue observation on the cases selected for the recent study and if possible to bring a percentage of these cases to autopsy so that pathological confirmation may be made of the disease processes."

Racial bigotry is the most important theme of the book because all of the victims chosen for the study were African-Americans who belonged to the poorest section of Alabama. The author writes, "Macon County has been economically depressed throughout the twentieth century," and knowing that people in this area would be unfamiliar with their rights as research subjects and concept of informed consent, government decided to lure them into this project. This speaks of extreme racial prejudice that prevails in the society, and plagues our government and medical community. Dr. H.L. Harris, Jr., an African-American physician, visited Macon County to see how racial and social prejudice played….....

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"James Jones' Bad Blood Is Certainly One" (2003, April 22) Retrieved June 27, 2025, from
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