Early in America’s crusade to spread the wonders of modern medicine, a group of researchers in Guatemala did something unspeakable in the name of science. Documentation of the project is just now coming to light, more than 60 years later, and it reads like a horror novel: Hundreds of men systematically infected with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in an effort, endorsed by both the U.S. and Guatemalan governments, to research the effectiveness of drug treatment.
Researchers exposed men to disease with varying degrees of intent. At first, Guatemalan health official Juan Funes selected prisoners in Guatemala City as subjects because prostitution at the penitentiary would likely yield fresh infections. But the researchers used more invasive tactics as well. The Washington Post reports, “in other cases, doctors put infectious material on the cervixes of uninfected prostitutes before they had sex with prisoners.” When they needed more infections, they took more aggressive measures—“direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men’s penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded … or in a few cases through spinal punctures,” according to the research of the historian who broke the story, Susan M. Reverby (interviewed recently on Democracy Now!).
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