Susan Reverby, a Medical Historian professor at Wellesley College and the author of “Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy,” is responsible for exposing the details of the medical testing. Reverby was doing research on the Tuskegee experiment (in which Black American men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated and tested for decades), when she discovered the unpublished work of Dr. John C. Cutler, who led the experiment in Guatemala and also had an important role in the Tuskegee study. According to Reverby, “As with Tuskegee, [the Guatemalan syphilis experiment’s] lessons ended up being about morality.”
From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalan prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers, as part of the experiment. At first, they created abrasions on the skin of each patient and physically poured the syphilis virus into the open wound to see if it would take. When that didn’t work, they injected each patient intravenously with the virus. When that didn’t work, they paid syphilis-infected prostitutes to have sex with the prisoners. The doctors were using the shocking methods to verify the relevance of the then relatively new drug penicillin, as an effective treatment against syphilis.
Secretary of State Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a joint statement, calling the study unethical. “Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”
