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The Past Isn't As Rosy As The Conservatives Make It Out To Be

 Peter Buxtun died today at age 86 from Alzheimer's.

Peter Buxtun is not famous but he should be. If you imagine that Nazis are the only ones to conduct horrific, lethal medical experiments on humans, I've got news -- the Shining City on a Hill (as Reagan called the US) did too.
Peter Buxtun was the whistleblower who blew the lid off the Tuskegee Study.
The Tuskegee Study was an infamous experiment conducted by the US Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972 to study the effects of untreated syphilis on black men. 1972 is surprisingly recent for something like this to still be going on, and was only 8 years in the past when Reagan ran for president.
600 Alabama black men were told that they would receive free medical care but all they ever got were placebos.
Buxtun's actions led to the Belmont Report, released in 1979, a year before Reagan ran for office. It is a foundational document in medical ethics, and established guidelines and regulations for human subjects research including informed consent, explanation of potential risks and benefits, and oversight to insure that the study follows the regulations. I've been on a few of these committees. It also made illegal failure to inform a patient of a diagnosis.
This is the America that evangelicals and other conservatives think was perfect and unblemished, and want to drag us back to. It was, indeed, a pretty sweet deal for white men, as long as they weren't Irish, Jewish or Italian. But if you weren't? And god forbid you be native American as they were the explicit target of genocide. Philip Sheridan, the general in charge of native policy after the Civil War put it quite accurately and succinctly when he described his policy as "extermination."
Peter Buxtun is an American hero, but he received no medals and there are no memorials. Every school child should know his name. They should also know the name of Taliaferro Clark, the director of the Public Health Service who created the study based on his belief that the effects of syphilis depended on race.
Remember this the next time someone tells you that America used to be a better place. It wasn't.

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