A veteran of World War I, Dr. Fred L. Lander, Jr., opened his office for the general practice of medicine at Fifth and Polk Streets in Lynchburg in 1928 and practiced there until his death in 1941.
Dr. Lander was one of the first African American physicians to use sulfa drugs to treat venereal diseases, a serious health problem during the 1930s, when three times as many Virginia blacks as whites died of syphilis.
The Tuskegee syphilis study, which allowed the disease to go untreated in the study's subjects, began in 1932 and continued until 1972. The Tuskegee study was the most famous example of the use of African Americans as subjects for medical experiments. This practice made many African Americans suspicious of establishment health care.
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