I’m not sure if you ever heard of the Tuskegee Experiment, but I won’t be surprised if you haven’t because it’s consistent with how White Supremacy tries to hide or down play the tragedies that were done in the United States!
From 1932 to 1972, for 40 YEARS, the U.S. Public Health Services conducted an “experiment” on 399 BLACK MEN with the syphilis virus AT FIRST. The Doctors told the men they were treating them for “Bad Blood” but in all actuality they were injecting them with the syphilis virus. The doctors also had no intentions of curing the men once infected with the virus. The doctors were using the illusion of “Free Health Care” to conduct their “experiments” at one point they were doing spinal taps on the Men.
At the end of the experiment, 28 of the men had died directly from the cause of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis. This is just further Evidence of how America has always targeted Black People!
A boy suffering from congenital syphilis. The suffering this illness caused in pre-penicillin eras was completely excruciating. Approximately 15 percent of the entire population of Paris was believed to carry the disease by the end of the 19th century. Syphilis was shameful in these times, as many men got it from prostitutes working at brothels and whorehouses - symbols of decadence and debauchery in the public eyes - where it roamed free and untamed. Many people suffered in silence for whole lifetimes, subjecting themselves to treatments as horrible, prolonged and dehumanizing as the sickness itself.
See, syphilis does not necessarily kill you right away; many lived with their horrible syphilitic terror for 40 years or more. A most sinister, detailed account for it in can be found in the diary later published as La doulou: extraits du journal d'Edmond de Goncourt, describing french writers Alphonse Daudet’s gruesome ordeal in late 1800’s France.
Tertiary syphilis would arise between three to 15 years after infection, and emerged as “gummatous” (forming gummas, soft tumor-like nodules, like what caused this lady’s ulcer) about 15% of the time. If the inflammatory nodules didn’t form on an important organ or blood vessel (as they could, and did, form anywhere in the body), gummatous syphilis wasn’t in and of itself fatal. Death from infected ulcers was not uncommon, however.
Interestingly, you could have gone to town with this lady and not gotten syphilis from her, despite her having been infected for probably more than half her life - tertiary syphilis is no longer transmissible.
A Practical Treatise on Diseases of the Skin. John V. Shoemaker, 1892.
The phrase “the mad ramblings of a syphilitic mind” isn’t just a dismissive remark made to crazy people. Syphilis really did addle the mind in amazingly destructive ways, and had a tendency to destroy the inhibition before anything else.
Circa 1951, elementary-school children in Athens, Greece crowd around each other outside, while drinking UNICEF-supplied milk from tin cups. The noon meal includes other foods supplied by UNICEF, a programme reaching thousands of schoolchildren.
Since 1948 in Greece, UNICEF has provided food assistance, including milk, cheese, meats, fish, cod-liver oil and peanut butter, to some 1 million Greek children and mothers. In an anti-tuberculosis campaign including the Scandanavian Relief Societies, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, begun in October 1949, more than 1.3 million Greeks were tested for tuberculosis and 931,000 vaccinated with BCG serum. Other UNICEF aid includes donations of penicillin to combat syphilis; raw cotton and wool for clothing and raw leather to make 150,000 pairs of shoes; as well as support for child-care training and the setting up of milk pasteurization plants.
have you ever had syphillis? how do you know so much bout it?
Have you ever been to school? You know how you can learn about plant growth and math and shit without being a tree or an abstract concept of a number?
Knowing about syphilis, it’s sort of like that, you know? Booklearnin’ is under-rated. I prefer not to have intimate contact with the diseases I write about, especially considering that some of them are (technically) extinct, most are pretty horrific, and several would probably require contact that my partner (and, really, myself D:) would object to.
In 1495 a horrific new disease appeared in Europe. Acquired by sexual contact and initially spread through Europe by mercenary soldiers from the army of King Charles VIII of France returning from a successful invasion of Italy, this new disease was extraordinarily unpleasant. Commentators at the time described dark green “boils that stood out like acorns,” accompanied by a stench so vile that if you smelt it you would imagine yourself infected, and by pains so severe that it was “as if the sick had laid upon a fire”.
This new disease went by a variety of names, including The Great Pox, but most people preferred to blame it on the neighbours: the British called it the “French disease,” the French called it the “Italian" or “Neapolitan disease” and the Italians called it the “Spanish disease”. Today it is more widely known now as syphilis, an infection caused by the Treponema pallidum bacteria. Read more.