Tuskegee study whistleblower Peter Buxtun dies

The man who alerted the country that hundreds of Black men were infected with syphilis but not treated has died. The Tuskegee study wasn’t a secret but it didn’t raise ethical concerns among the medical and science communities either.

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When Peter Buxtun overheard a co-worker talking about the study’s 400 Black men with syphilis who were intentionally not being treated with antibiotics, he had to say something, The Associated Press reported. The reason for withholding treatment: to see how syphilis attacked the body over time.

The men who were recruited from Macon County, Alabama, were not told what they were being studied for, specifically. Instead, they were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” something that described several illnesses such as anemia, fatigue and syphilis. The typical treatment was arsenic and mercury, The Los Angeles Times reported.

The men who participated got free medical exams, meals and burial insurance if the government was allowed to perform an autopsy when they died.

More than 600 men were enrolled in the study, but a third did not receive any treatment, the Times reported.

“This study was completely accepted by the American medical community,” Ted Pestorius from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in 2022 during a commemoration of the end of the study.

Buxtun was working for the federal government in the U.S. Public Health Service, and when he learned more about the study, wrote a letter about the ethical concerns of it to the CDC in 1966. The next year he was called to the Atlanta office and was reprimanded, and still he demanded the men in Tuskegee be treated.

Buxtun left the government and went to law school. In 1972 he connected with a reporter with the AP and gave her documents about the study. Edith Lederer gave the papers to investigative reporter Jean Heller. Heller published a story in 1972 that led to Congressional hearings and a class-action lawsuit that eventually paid the men and their families $10 million.

By the time the story was published, seven of the men died from syphilis and another 154 died from heart disease, The Los Angeles Times reported.

Four months after Heller’s story was published, the Tuskegee study was shut down, the AP reported.

“As much injustice as there was for Black Americans back in 1932, when the study began, I could not believe that an agency of the federal government, as much of a mistake as it was initially, could let this continue for 40 years,” Heller said according to the Times . “It just made me furious.”

It wasn’t until 1997 that the men received an apology from then-President Bill Clinton, who called the study “shameful.”

The final study participant died in 2004, the Times reported

Buxtun died May 18, but his death from Alzheimer’s disease was just announced by his attorney Minna Fernan.

Buxtun was born in Prague in 1937 to a Jewish father. His family immigrated to the U.S. from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. He compared the Tuskegee study to the medical experiments conducted by Nazi doctors on Jewish prisoners and others they had held in captivity. However, U.S. officials did not believe the Tuskegee study and the Nazi experiments held the same moral and ethical weight.

Buxtun attended the University of Oregon. He also was in the Army as a combat medic and psychiatric social worker. He started working for the government’s health service in 1965.

After leaving the health service, Buxtun would write and give presentations about the Tuskegee study. Privately, he traveled, bought and sold antiques and spent two decades trying to recover the items that were stolen from his family by the Nazis, the AP reported