The Guatemalan syphilis scandal

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2020

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

A team of American doctors, led by the distinguished physician Dr John Cutler, carried out secretive STD tests in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. The doctors experimented on more than one thousand prisoners, sex workers, mental institution inmates and soldiers, injecting them without their consent with syphilis and gonorrhea. In some cases the victims were provided with penicillin to combat the diseases; in many others they weren't given anything. Mike Lanchin speaks to Susan Reverby, a medical historian, who discovered the original documents from the greusome experiments and helped get a public apology for the victims from the Obama administration in October 2010.

Photo: A doctor examines the injection site of a female psychiatric patient in Guatemala who was exposed to syphilis, cerca 1948 (from the papers of John Cutler/the National Archives and Records Administration)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.7	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.5	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:18.0	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.
0:36.0	Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast on the BBC World Service with me
0:46.2	Mike Lanchin, first-hand accounts of events that have shaped our world. Today the
0:52.0	disturbing story of how American doctors deliberately infected
0:56.2	more than a thousand people in Guatemala with gonorrhea and syphilis without
1:01.2	their consent. This was part of a gruesome US government
1:05.2	medical experiment which took place in the 1940s but which remained a secret
1:10.3	until 2003 when a historian found the original records from the tests,
1:15.8	eventually forcing the Obama administration into a humiliating public apology.
1:21.2	That historian was Susan Reverby and she recalls very clearly
1:25.3	some of the shocking details that she discovered. I mean I'm a pretty hardened
1:30.0	researcher if you do any kind of work on history of medicine you kind of get used
1:34.1	to the horror stories this was pretty horrific because there were pictures of
1:39.1	men's penises being abraded with a needle so that you could drop an inoculum of syphilis into an open sore.
1:48.6	There were pictures of spinal taps and there were patient records, lab reports, just horrendous records of the kind of
1:59.3	research they were doing all written up in this very sort of cold and scientific language.
2:05.4	And what did you think about what you were reading and seeing?
	...

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