During the years of 1932 through 1972, doctors from the United States Department of Public Health conducted a study on 399 poor, black sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama, who were all infected with the incurable disease, syphilis, and 201 men of similar backgrounds who were uninfected. This study was based on the results of the 1930 survey that identified Macon County, Alabama as the county with the highest percentage of patients infected with syphilis out of the six states tested. These men were left untreated for forty years, being monitored by the physicians to document the phases of syphilis and its forms of spreading, in its natural, untreated state. But not only were these men not treated and used as human guinea pigs, they were not even told what disease they were infected with. The doctors told the men that they were suffering from, and being treated for, "bad blood," a nicer, more discreet way of saying syphilis. In fact, the men were not only not being treated or informed of their disease, but officials from the Department of Public Health had to work hard to make sure the men were not treated by any outside sources. The men were given free meals, free medical exams, and free burial insurance for cooperating and partaking in the experiment. [Brown][NPR][Virginia].
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This experiment done by the physicians at the Department of Public Health is a horrifying example of bad science. The fact that doctors, whose sole job it is to heal and revitalize patients, allowed humans to slowly die, deteriorate, and spread a deadly disease all for some scientific information shocked people all over the world when news broke out of the experiment in 1972 [NPR]. Even after the 1947 discovery that penicillin would cure the previously incurable disease, doctors withheld the information from patients to allow the experiment to progress [NPR]. .
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In 1930 there were no guidelines "to influence the formulation of a prospective study of patients with an untreated chronic disease" [Brown].