Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment

In February 1948, Berta was injected in her left arm with syphilis. She was a female patient at the National Psychiatric Hospital of Guatemala and her age and illness that brought her to the hospital are unknown. A month after her injection, she developed scabies and Doctor John Cutler noted that she had developed red bumps in the arm that was injected. She was described to appear as if she was going to die, but Cutler did not specify why. On August 23, six months after the initial injection, Cutler put gonorrheal pus from another male patient into Berta’s eyes, urethra, and rectum. He also re-infected her with syphilis. On August 27, with her eyes filled with pus from gonorrhea, and bleeding from her urethra, Berta was found dead (52). This was one of hundreds of human subjects involved in intentional exposure experiment involving syphilis. It was a two-year biomedical research experiment funded and conducted …show more content…
Despite the media attention which the experiment received, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical issues, and the apologies from both President Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, the experiment has not been studied extensively. The questions of why the USPHS conducted the study in Guatemala and how it continued with permission from the Guatemalan government have been addressed by historian Susan Reverby. Moreover, the panel behind the Study of Bioethical issues has addressed race as a crucial component of the experiments, it barely mentions the racial implications developed through science that are examined in the experiment, failing to consult Cutler’s beliefs on race and disease available in the documents held at the National Archives which bear significantly on its racial assessment. By examining the specific ways in which racial beliefs are engaged in scientific research can the experiment be

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Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment Summary