Bill Jenkins, minority health advocate who worked to expose Tuskegee syphilis study, dies at age 73

Dr. Bill Jenkins devoted most of his professional life to addressing racism in health care. While he had many accomplishments over the course of his extraordinary career, he was best known for trying to put an end to the Tuskegee Experiment, an unethical study conducted on black men by the U.S. government in order to learn the effects of syphilis on the human body. Jenkins died in Charleston, South Carolina, on Feb. 17 at the age of 73. 

Jenkins was employed at the United States Public Health Service as a statistician when he learned about the study. The federal government had intentionally lied to hundreds of black men in Macon, Alabama, about treating their “bad blood,” a term used locally to describe a variety of illnesses. The men, many of whom had syphilis, were initially recruited under the belief that they were receiving free medical treatment at the Tuskegee Institute. Most of them were sharecroppers who had never before seen a doctor. The men were never informed of the experiment which denied them treatment for their condition, even as they suffered blindness, illness, brain damage, and death—even though penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis in 1947. The study lasted 40 years, from 1932 to 1972. In that time, some of the infected men passed the disease on to their wives, some of whom subsequently passed it on to their children. 

The New York Times describes Jenkins’ quest to halt the study. He was first told of it by a colleague, and proceeded to do research on it. He found numerous articles about it in medical journals and even found that local chapters of the American Medical Association (AMA) supported it. Jenkins took his concerns to his then-supervisor who told him, “Don’t worry about it.” He later discovered that same supervisor was a monitor of the study.

Jenkins and some of his colleagues then wrote about the study and sent the article to several black doctors and reporters. However, the story was never picked up. It wasn’t until later that another employee at the health service sent the information to the Associated Press (AP). The AP story made the front page of The New York Times and soon after, the study was stopped. 

Learning about the study informed Jenkins’ choice to become an advocate in his medical career.