One of the leading story on the front page of the newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, was about a famous dog, Riona. Riona was rescued after being set on fire by her owner. Six months after her recovery she made her first public appearance. For the past few months she has been a popular topic on social media, and featured in newspapers in Germany and the Netherlands.
Our family loves dogs. My three adult children have dogs; one of them has three. They grew up with dogs: Penny, Tuda-Buff, Brengle, Cuddles, and Tigger. When we have family gatherings, it is not usual for a dog story to be told. My attraction to the story of Riona is natural. I can’t imagine her being set on fire by her owner.
But her news story of recue, recovery, and world attention got my concentrated attention because of the lead story on page four of the same newspaper; 50 YEARS AFTER TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS STUDY. It was one of the most unethical health studies in U.S. history. 600 black men, many of them share croppers and had never been in a doctor’s office. 399 of them had the bacterial infection syphilis, and 201 did not.
About 11 years into the study, penicillin became the widely available treatment for syphilis. Shockingly, the doctors opted not to effective care for the participants. They watched them suffer severe side effects from their untreated infection, tracking syphilis’ progression to death.
Though I have known about the Tuskegee study for a long time, it has never impacted me as it did when reading about it again, alongside the story of Riona. By the time an ad hoc advisory panel deemed the study “ethically unjustified” and it shut down, 28 participants had died from syphilis and 100 from related complications. At least 40 spouses of the participants had been diagnosed, and the disease had been passed down to 19 children. (The Commercial Appeal, Dec. 5, 2022)
I really don’t know why I wanted to share this. I celebrate what folks have done for Riona, and when I think of Tuskegee, I think of the Tuskegee Institute and George Washington Carver, a black man, who left behind a legacy as not only one of America’s greatest inventors, but also as a pioneering agriculturalist, award-winning artist and humble humanitarian. Maybe the two stories reminded me of that adage, sometimes humans are treated like dogs, and dogs like are treated like humans.