It was another fun day of videotaping for our TA of the Day Lesson wrapping up Enemy of the People. Rather than do a tedious rehash of the play, Catherine and Amy decided to focus on the theme of Whistle Blowers.
The directions were to research a famous whistleblower and connect it to Enemy of the People.
1. Summarize briefly who this person was and why this person was a whistleblower. Here is an example of one post that Talia did.
2. Compare and contrast this person to the whistleblower from Enemy of the People, Dr. Stockmann.
3. Include a wordle as your graphic that describes the whistleblower you have chosen. Complete this in no less than 150 words (excluding the words on your Wordle) and following the rest of guidelines found in the Week 9 overview.
Peter Buxton was the whistleblower in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. He was an interviewer for the U.S. Public Health Service and after learning that the experiment was extremely unethical he tried to uncover its injustice within the PHS. For six years these attempts failed, so he leaked the story to Jean Heller of the Washington Star, which published the story and led to the termination of the study. The Experiment attempted to understand the course of untreated syphilis based on a clinical study of 399 African American syphilitic farmers in Alabama from 1932 to 1972. The study was so blatantly unethical not only because information and basic medical care was prohibited, when a cure for syphilis became available, its access was denied. “In 1943, the PHS began to administer penicillin to patients with syphilis. Study subjects were excluded.” The aftermath of Buxton’s revelation caused the US to better regulate its ethics practices and has formed the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) and “it also led to federal regulation requiring Institutional Review Boards for protection of human subjects in studies involving human subjects”. Policies such as “informed consent” were adopted as well.
Unlike Dr. Stockman, Peter Buxton was not a doctor. Both Dr. Stockman and Buxton worked in areas of Public Health. They were alike in the way that they saw something happening that was unethical and very dangerous to human lives. They both decided to go against the majority to uncover the injustice and source of harm. Peter Buxton’s news eventually came out the harm was stopped but we do not know what happened in the end with Dr. Stockman’s information. However, their goals were the same. They saw human lives being treated as disposable and tried to shed light on sources of harm and injustice with the hope of ending unnecessary harm.
Works Cited
"Research Ethics: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study." Tuskegee University. Tuskegee University. Web. 21 Oct. 2009. .
"Tuskegee syphilis experiment." Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.,. Web. 21 Oct. 2009. .
Picture
http://www.anairhoads.org/govexperiments/tuskegee.shtml
When it comes to An Enemy of the People I think I enjoyed the play more so because I had to teach the class about it. Since I was the first group to go, I really kept up with the readings more so than if I hadn’t been forced to teach. I realized that when you have to teach on a subject it’s much easier if you find a connection or at least try to be interested in what your presenting.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Emily. I think I was able to enjoy reading this play more because we were able to teach some of it and to read each act piece by piece and have enough time to go over it all was nice as well. Each group that presented had great presentations as well as very creative activities planned for the class.
ReplyDeleteSadly I was not able to make it to class this week, but i did get all the information of what went on from Mike. I wish I had been able to attend because this story really was confusing for me and I didn't understand it well at all.
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