A medical society is wrestling with renaming its foremost prize, named after a pioneering government physician who, according to recent revelations, approved unethical medical experiments.
Thomas Parran, surgeon general from 1936 to 1948, brought about frank discussion and treatment of sexually transmitted disease nationwide, as well as in the military services during World War II. But experiments that exposed men, women and children to syphilis without their consent have tarnished his legacy.
"Ultimately, it is a question of human rights abuses and how we should recall this physician who did many great things, but who also was part of some disturbing decisions," says Bradley Stoner, head of the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association. The association announced Monday that members can vote in the next three weeks on whether to keep its lifetime achievement award named after Parran.
"He was a celebrity and did more to raise awareness of sexually transmitted diseases than any other American physician," says University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Jonathan Moreno. At the time, perhaps as much as 10% of the U.S. population suffered from syphilis.
Parran's legacy was tainted in 2010, however, when the U.S. government apologized to Guatemala for the syphilis experiments that exposed 1,308 men, women and children to the disease without consent from 1946 to 1948. Parran approved of the experiments. He also oversaw the early part of the infamous Tuskegee, Ala., experiment that ran from 1932 to 1972, in which U.S. Public Health Service researchers observed but didn't treat syphilis in 600 African-American men.
"Everyone agrees these were horrible experiments, dark moments in medicine," Stoner says. "The question is what is the best way to make a hard decision on how we see this part of the past."
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
Copyright 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.