Retropod is sponsored by Tito's handmade vodka. Drink responsibly.

Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

In the fall of 1932, flyers began appearing around Macon County, Alabama.

They promised, quote, colored people, a free blood test and special treatment for, quote, bad blood.

Hundreds of men, all black and many poor, signed up.

They were promised free meals, free physicals, and free burial insurance.

It all sounded like a great deal.

What the signs didn't tell them was that they would become part of a study called the Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in the Negro male.

It was a secret experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service

to study the progression of syphilis, a deadly venereal disease without treatment.

The study became so infamous that it's often now referred to in shorthand, Tuskegee.

The study recruited 600 black men. 399 were diagnosed with syphilis and 201 were a control

group without the disease. The researchers never told the men with syphilis and 201 were a control group without the disease.

The researchers never told the men with syphilis that they were not being treated,

that they were simply being watched until they died.

When the study began, existing treatments for syphilis were not very effective and were even dangerous.

But even after penicillin was discovered and used as a treatment for the disease, the men in the

Tuskegee study were not offered the antibiotic. That's right. The U.S. Public Health Service

created rapid treatment centers to offer penicillin to men afflicted with syphilis,

but not the men in the Tuskegee study.

In fact, one of the last survivors of the experiment, Charles Pollard, says he was never even told he had syphilis.

They just told him he had bad blood.

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