Vanessa Northington Gamble (born 1953) is a physician who chaired the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee in 1996. [1] [2] [3]
Born in West Philadelphia, Gamble was primarily raised by her maternal grandmother. She attended Philadelphia High School for Girls and graduated in 1970, then studied medical sociology and biology at Hampshire College, graduating with her bachelor's degree in 1974. Gamble then attended medical school and graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, earning her M.D. in 1983 and her Ph.D. in the history and sociology of science in 1987. She completed her graduate medical education (residency) at the University of Massachusetts. [1]
Gamble began her career with appointments at the Harvard School of Public Health, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts. In 1989, she was appointed an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, where she taught courses on the intersection of race and public health in the United States. At the University of Wisconsin Medical School, she founded and was director of its Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. [1]
In 1996, [3] Gamble chaired a committee to investigate the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, an unethical, racist study of long-term syphilis infection in black men. [1] The committee's final report, published on May 20, called for then-President Bill Clinton to issue an apology in response to the harm done to the Macon County community and Tuskegee University, and the fears of government and medical abuse it created among African Americans. The report also called for the creation of programs to educate the public regarding the study, to train health care providers, and for ethics in scientific research. [4] President Clinton issued a formal apology on behalf of the government on May 16, 1997. [1] In her seminal article written later in 1997, [5] she explained however that while the Tuskegee Syphilis Study contributed to African Americans' continuing mistrust of the biomedical community, the study was not the most important reason. She called attention to a broader historical and social context that had already negatively influenced community attitudes, including countless prior medical injustices before the study's start in 1932. [6]
She left the University of Wisconsin in 2000, and moved to Tuskegee University, where she led the first National Bioethics Center to be established at a historically black university. [7] Beginning in 2003, Gamble was a professor at Johns Hopkins University in the school of public health. [1] As of 2016, she is a professor of medical humanities at George Washington University, where she began teaching in 2007. [8] [9]
Gamble has also worked with research organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, and the American Foundation for AIDS Research. [1]
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was a study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on a group of nearly 400 African American men with syphilis. The purpose of the study was to observe the effects of the disease when untreated, though by the end of the study medical advancements meant it was entirely treatable. The men were not informed of the nature of the experiment, and more than 100 died as a result.
Hydroxycarbamide, also known as hydroxyurea, is a medication used in sickle-cell disease, essential thrombocythemia, chronic myelogenous leukemia, polycythemia vera, and cervical cancer. In sickle-cell disease it increases fetal hemoglobin and decreases the number of attacks. It is taken by mouth.
Nosophobia, also known as disease phobia or illness anxiety disorder, is the irrational fear of contracting a disease, a type of specific phobia. Primary fears of this kind are fear of contracting HIV infection, pulmonary tuberculosis (phthisiophobia), sexually transmitted infections, cancer (carcinophobia), heart diseases (cardiophobia), and catching the common cold or flu.
Peter Buxtun is a former employee of the United States Public Health Service who became known as the whistleblower responsible for ending the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
The Guatemala syphilis experiments were United States-led human experiments conducted in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. The experiments were led by physician John Charles Cutler, who also participated in the late stages of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Doctors infected 1,300 people, including at least 600 soldiers and people from various impoverished groups with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid, without the informed consent of the subjects. Only 700 of them received treatment. In total, 5,500 people were involved in all research experiments, of whom 83 died by the end of 1953, though it is unknown whether or not the injections were responsible for all these deaths. Serology studies continued through 1953 involving the same vulnerable populations in addition to children from state-run schools, an orphanage, and rural towns. However, the intentional infection of patients ended with the original study.
Research shows many health disparities among different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Different outcomes in mental and physical health exist between all U.S. Census-recognized racial groups, but these differences stem from different historical and current factors, including genetics, socioeconomic factors, and racism. Research has demonstrated that numerous health care professionals show implicit bias in the way that they treat patients. Certain diseases have a higher prevalence among specific racial groups, and life expectancy also varies across groups.
Virginia Margaret Alexander was an American physician, public health researcher, and the founder of the Aspiranto Health Home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Eunice Verdell Rivers Laurie (1899–1986) was an African American nurse who worked in the state of Alabama. She is known for her work as one of the nurses of the U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study in Macon County from 1932 to 1972.
Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, 323 F.2d 959, was a federal case, reaching the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that "separate but equal" racial segregation in publicly funded hospitals was a violation of equal protection under the United States Constitution.
Eugene Heriot Dibble Jr. (1893–1968) was an American physician and head of the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He played an important role in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which was a clinical study conducted on syphilis in African American males from 1932 to 1972.
The Baltimore Lead Paint Study was a controversial clinical study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) in poor Baltimorean neighborhoods during the 1990s. Families with young children were deliberately exposed to lead by being housed with their families in apartments where lead paint had not been completely removed. Researchers hoped to show that less stringent lead abatement techniques that would cost landlords less money would pose minimal health risks to children. The study was criticised for targeting poor African American children, for exposing children to a known health risk and for inadequate participant consent. The backlash culminated in class action lawsuits against KKI by Ericka Grimes and Myron Higgins, two of the subjects representing on the order of a hundred affected children without adequate care.
Elizabeth Fee, also known as Liz Fee, was a historian of science, medicine and health. She was the Chief of the United States National Library of Medicine History of Medicine Division.
Paul Bertau Cornely was an American physician, public health pioneer, and civil rights activist. In 1934, he became the first African American to earn a doctoral degree in public health. He was elected President of the American Public Health Association in 1970.
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Asa Cristina Laurell is a Mexican sociologist who has had a long career in both research and government positions. She grew up in Sweden, but her education eventually brought her to Mexico. In Mexico, she was awarded two degrees and conducted research that focused on health policy, including ensuring access to health care for people in Mexico and various other Latin American countries. She is known for her role in helping to found the Latin American Association of Social Medicine (ALAMES), as well as the contributions she has made to widening access to health care for Mexicans during her time in government. This included serving as Undersecretary of Integration and Development at the Ministry of Health in Mexico.
Count Dillon Gibson, Jr. was an American physician known for his advocacy in medical civil rights. As a young professor at the Medical College of Virginia, in 1955 he became the first person outside Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments to raise ethical objections to the study. He was on the medical auxiliary committee that supported voting rights workers during Freedom Summer and with one of his collaborators from that project, H. Jack Geiger, in 1965 Gibson cofounded the first community health center in the United States, beginning a network that grew to serve 28 million low-income patients, as of 2020. In 1965 he was chair of the Department of Preventative Medicine at Tufts University Medical School, but moved to the Stanford School of Medicine in 1969 to chair of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine. He worked in that role until his retirement in 1988.
Vence L. Bonham Jr. is an American lawyer who is the acting Deputy Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the U. S. National Institutes of Health, and is the leader of the NHGRI Health Disparities Unit. His research focuses on social determinants of health, particularly with regard to the social implications of new genomic knowledge and technologies.
Anne Magdalen Bahlke was an American physician, medical researcher, and public health official.
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Emily Ai-hua Wang is an American physician who is a professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. She is Director of the Yale SEICHE Center for Health and Justice. She was appointed a MacArthur Fellow in 2022.