Bad Vibrations
June 17, 2010
In “The Rhetoric of Dehumanization: An Analysis of Medical Reports of the Tuskegee Syphilis Project,†Martha Solomon brilliantly demonstrates how the project’s researchers hid their work in plain sight. Specifically, Solomon used the published reports of the Tuskegee syphilis study – which involved medical professionals actively withholding medicines from black men with syphilis for four decades – to show how the dehumanizing, scientized language of modern medicine “can obscure and deemphasize any ethical, non-scientific perspective.†(Bioethics Forum)
