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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is Stuff You Should know about one of the more shameful chapters in U.S. history and indeed medical history, I think you could say, too.

Yeah, for sure. And by the way, if you hear weird noises, my immediate neighborhood is sort of crazy right now.

What's going on?

Well, I've got construction next door.

I've got a lawn crew across the street, and they're also shooting a movie across the street.

So it's just pandemonium is happening outside these sort of quiet doors.

You know what I would call that?

Shameful.

Not like this episode, for sure. That was my attempt at Segway. Yeah, nice work. I don't know about that, but thanks. By the way, this one is a listener recommendation and a teenage listener. This came from Miles Kendrick, a 14-year-old. Nice, Miles. Great idea. Yeah, thanks for that.

Yeah, we're talking about what's called the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment or Tuskegee syphilis study, and the actual official name for it was the Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis

in the Negro male.

Yeah, that spells it all out, doesn't it?

It does. The fact that there's an official title for this

just really kind of goes to show you just how nefarious the whole thing was.

And it was indeed a nefarious experiment, no matter, it doesn't really matter how you slice it.

You can look at it any number of ways and it always still washes out stinky.

Yeah, it does.

And this was an experiment.

I mean, I guess we'll go ahead and say what happened generally is that they recruited black men in Macon County, Alabama, that had syphilis. Kind of one of the misconceptions is that

they were given syphilis as part of this. Not true, but don't worry, we did that in Guatemala,

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