“Normal Exposure” and Inoculation
Syphilis: A PHS “Tuskegee” Doctor in
Guatemala, 1946-48

Journal of Policy History
Special Issue on Human Subjects
January 2011
in presspre-copy edited draft
DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT EXPRESSPERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR©Susan M. Reverby

Susan M. Reverby
Marion Butler McLean Professor in the Historyof Ideas and Professor of Women’s and GenderStudies, Wellesley College
Wellesley MA
781 283 2535
sreverby@wellesley.edu

Policy is often made based on historical understandings of particular
events, and the story of the “Tuskegee” Syphilis Study (the Study) has, morethan any other medical research experiment, shaped policy surrounding humansubjects. 1 The forty-year study of “untreated syphilis in the male Negro”
sparked outrage in 1972 after it became widely known, and inspired
requirements for informed consent, the protection of vulnerable subjects, andoversight by institutional review boards.2
When the story of the Study circulates, however, it often becomes
mythical. In truth the United States Public Health Service (PHS) doctors who ran
the Study observed the course of the already acquired and untreated late latentdisease in hundreds of African American men in Macon County, Alabama. They
provided a little treatment in the first few months in 1932 and then neither
extensive heavy metals treatment nor penicillin after it proved a cure for the latelatent stage of the disease in the 1950s.3 Yet much folklore asserts that the doctors
went beyond this neglect, and that they secretly infected the men by injecting themwith the bacteria that causes syphilis. This virally spread belief about the PHS’s
intentional infecting appears almost daily in books, articles, talks, letters,
websites, tweets, news broadcasts, political rhetoric, and above all in whispers
and conversations. It is reinforced when photographs of the Study’s blood draws
circulate, especially when they are cropped to show prominently a black arm anda white hand on a syringe that could, to an unknowing eye, be seen as an
injection.
Historians of the Study have spent decades now trying to correct themisunderstandings in the public and the academy, and to make the facts as2

knowable as possible.4 The story is horrific enough, it is argued, without
perpetuating misunderstanding over what really did happen and how manyknew about it.5 What if, however, the PHS did conduct a somewhat secret study
whose subjects were infected with syphilis by one of the PHS doctors who also
worked in “Tuskegee?” How should this be acknowledged and affect how we
discuss historical understandings that drive the need for human subject
protection?
Rumors and Realities
Scholars who wish to debunk the myth of deliberate infection in the Study
can acknowledge that myths do express some basic realities. As the oral historian
Alessandro Portelli argues, “The wrong tales allow us to recognize the interestsof the tellers and the dreams and desires beneath them"6 “A rumor,” otherfolklorists suggest, “is a ‘form of communication though which men [andwomen] caught together in an ambiguous situation attempt to construct ameaningful interpretation of it by pooling their intellectual resources.’”7 In ahighly racialized and racist country, the idea that government scientists—drunkon their power over trusting sharecroppers in need of care—would deliberately
and secretly infect black men with a debilitating and sometimes deadly disease
seems possible.
Yet those scholars may also argue that people who believe in suchdeliberate infection are confusing the Study with other American 1960s and1970s horror tales about overzealous medical researchers who injected cancer
cells into elderly Jewish patients and provided live hepatitis cells through oral
and injecting means to young children with mental retardation. The conflating
also comes when the Study is referred to as “America’s Nuremberg” (to equate3its affect on ethics) and to link it to the horrors of the monstrous Nazi medical
experiments. In addition, to think the men were infected taps deep into ourcultural collective consciences’ fears of experimentation. It avoids considering theStudy’s unwitting participants’ sexual activities, or those of their parents, sincesyphilis is primarily, of course, a sexually transmitted disease. To assume themen in the Study were infected, rather than watched for decades, appears tomake the racism worse, although it is the very ordinariness of the withholding oftreatment that ought to frighten us more.8
Historians and other scholars have also argued that there were debatesover whether the heavy metals treatments were appropriate for those in the latelatent stage of the disease and that public health’s mission was to stop contagion,
not focus on chronic illness. Others have claimed, too, that the concern with thedangers of penicillin limited some of its usefulness, especially for patients who
were at least two decades out from initial syphilitic infection.9
Historians may also emphasize medical understandings of syphilis’s
stages and transmission. These explanations require discussing the multiple
stages of the disease and when and how decisions about treating those in latency
were made. More importantly, even if the government doctors had wanted togive the men syphilis, it is very difficult to pass on syphilis outside of sexual
contact, breast-feeding, or congenitally from a still infectious mother to her
newborn. To explain this is also to confront pre-20th century understandings ofthe disease as hereditary, not just congenital, since syphilis cannot be just passed
down in genes or somehow through a bloodline. It demands explaining thedoctors could not just inject the spirochetal bacteria that causes syphilis easily
from the blood of one person to another, and that centuries of research efforts4

had demonstrated the difficulties of finding ways experimentally to recreate thedisease in the healthy.10 The Treponema pallidum, the spirochete-shaped bacteriathat causes syphilis, cannot be cultured and grown in vitro in a laboratory (unlike
N. gonorrhoea, which can be cultured).
In sum, it takes time and a commitment to learning the medical science,
understanding standard public health practices, and considering cultural beliefs
in both the public and health care communities to explain why the men in
Alabama were not, and could not easily have been, infected by the PHS, and yet
why this is believed. Telling a quick black and white story makes for a better
rhetorical media or political sound bite, or a brief historical introduction in a
glossed over bioethics lesson.
Ironically, though, the mythic version of the “Tuskegee” Study may offer
a better picture of mid-century PHS ethics than the seemingly more informed
accounts. For Public Health Service researchers did, in fact, deliberately infectpoor and vulnerable men and women with syphilis in order to study the disease.
The mistake of the myth is to set that story in Alabama, when it took placefurther south, in Guatemala.
The Guatemala story emerges from the records of work done by the PHS’s
Dr. John C. Cutler between 1946 and 1948, now in the University of Pittsburgh
archives. An internationally known public health researcher-administrator andexpert on sexually transmitted diseases and reproductive health, Cutler had been
an assistant surgeon general in the PHS and the deputy director of the Pan
American Sanitary Bureau (a precursor to the Pan American HealthOrganization).11 He worked in Guatemala, India and West Africa and ended his
career as, his obituary in 2003 read, “a much beloved professor both at the5graduate school of Public Health and the Graduate School of Public andInternational Affairs” at Pitt.12
Cutler was dedicated to researching and conquering sexually transmitted(then known as venereal) diseases and providing usable and effective
contraception to women. He published more than fifty articles on varying
venereal diseases, the prophylaxis of disease with chemical contraceptives, andthe lessons for ending the AIDS epidemic.13 Those who know about the“Tuskegee” Study will recognize his name as a key researcher of that work
during the 1960s and one of its staunchest defenders on PBS’s 1993 Nova film
about it called “The Deadly Deception,” produced more than twenty years after
the Study closed.14
Almost two decades before his involvement with the Study in Alabama,
the PHS put Cutler in charge of a two-year research project in Guatemala. This
experiment in the global, rather than the American South, differed from the
Study in Alabama in two majors ways: government doctors did infect people withsyphilis and then did treat them with penicillin. In this research program of aseries of carefully delineated experiments, PHS doctors exposed their subjects tosyphilis or gonorrhea through the use of infectious prostitutes or directly
through inoculum made from tissue from human and animal syphilitic gummas
and chancres, or pus of gonorrhea filed sores. After learning what they wishedfrom each exposure, they used penicillin presumably to cure the infection.
Exploring why these experiments in Guatemala were so different fromthose in Alabama provides insight into the ethical concerns of the PHS
researchers, the powerful pull of the need for scientific knowledge, and the
difficulty of analyzing the inter-relationship and movement of research between
6what has been called the “imperial periphery” and “metropolitantransformations.”15
Penicillin Cure or Chemical Prophylaxis?
By the end of World War II, penicillin became more widely available andhad begun to demonstrate its effectiveness as a cure with early and secondarysyphilis and numerous other diseases.16 Much of the drug’s doses and limitations
still remained to be tested. Looking out at the future, 1940s syphilologists began
to realize, however, as Johns Hopkins’s Joseph Earle Moore would lament a
decade later, ”the biologically minded clinician regrets… that syphilis seems to
be vanishing with most of its fascinating and more fundamental riddles still
unsolved.”17
One of these remaining questions had to do with if, in addition to
condoms, there was a need for a better chemical prophylaxis against the disease
that a man could apply directly to his penis right after possible exposure, orwhether just relying upon penicillin as cure from a health professional after thesyphilis was diagnosed would be sufficient. 18 Syphilologists were well aware of
the problems with many of the serologies done to determine syphilis, theinability to translate animal research studies (primarily done with rabbits andsometimes with chimpanzees) to humans, the complicated chronicity of thedisease, and the wiliness of the syphilitic spirochete that had fascinated them for
decades.
In 1944 the PHS had done experiments on prophylaxis in gonorrhea at theTerre Haute Federal Penitentiary in the United States. In this prison, the“volunteers” were deliberately injected with gonorrhea, but the PHS had foundit difficult to get the men to exhibit infection and the study was abandoned.19 To
7

continue that work, and to extend it to syphilis, the PHS looked south beyond
American borders.
The PHS had a long history of international work going back to its 19th
century participation in foreign quarantines and sanitary conferences with afocus on infectious diseases, and then its 1945 establishment of an Office ofInternational Relations to formalize these efforts. 20 To coordinate disease control
in the Americas, the PHS had led the organizing in 1901 of the Pan American
Sanitary Bureau (the precursor to the Pan American Health Organization) andthe American Surgeon Generals, official heads of the PHS, served as directors of
the Bureau between 1902 until 1936. 21 Indeed, one historian has argued the Pan
American Sanitary Bureau “functioned until the late 1930s…as a virtual branchof the [PHS].”22 In turn many Central American and Latin American countries
sought assistance from the PHS and the Rockefeller Foundation as their funds
and surveys assisted in the creation of federal control over health in regional andindigenous areas through the development of a public health infrastructure.
The United Fruit Company owned and controlled much of Guatemala, thequintessential “banana republic,” in the first half of the 20th century. When the
PHS looked to Guatemala for its research in the immediate post-World War II
years, it came into the country during the period known for its relative freedoms;
between 1944 and the U.S. led CIA coup of the elected government in 1954, there
were efforts made at labor protection laws, land reform, and democraticelections. The PHS was part of the effort to use Guatemala for scientific researchas they presumed to transfer laboratory materials, skills, and knowledge to a
Guatemalan public health elite.23

8

Guatemala appeared to be a possibility asrfrr an excellent site for study
for several reasons. The PHS training of Juan Funes, Guatemala’s leading
venereal disease public health official, made the forging of close cooperationeasier and the building of a public health infrastructure important. Unlike
Alabama, where the PHS expected to find a large number of subjects with thelate latent stage of the disease already, Guatemala offered subjects who did not
yet have syphilis. For in his somewhat haphazard surveys in the 1930s, theHarvard Medical School Tropical Medicine professor George Cheever Shattuck
found little syphilis in the Guatemalan highlands and reported little in the army
as well. Shattuck shared the belief of Guatemalan health officials that “syphilis is
more frequent in Latins [especially in Guatemala City] than in Indians and that,when manifested in an Indian, it appears in mild form.” 24 Racialized
assumptions about the disease, central to the project in Alabama, also followed it
to Guatemala.
With a grant from the National Institute of Health to the Pan American
Sanitary Bureau under the direction of the PHS’s Venereal Disease ResearchLaboratory (VDRL), the PHS cooperated with officials at the Guatemala’s
Ministry of Health, the National Army of the Revolution, the National Mental
Health Hospital and Ministry of Justice on what was benignly called “a series ofexperimental studies on syphilis in man.” The focus of the experiments was tounderstand whether various chemicals, other than the ones then available, could
be used as a prophylaxis against syphilis after sexual exposure to the disease, totry and see what caused false positive serologic tests for the disease, and todemonstrate more fully when and how differing dosages of penicillin actually
cured infection.25
9

The PHS and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau assigned Cutler, who had
been working at the VDRL and on the Terre Haute prison gonorrhea project, tolead this research in Guatemala with the assistance of the PHS-trained Funes.
Cutler and Funes had two goals. One was to use what was called “syphilization”
to test the human response to “fresh infective material to enhance body response
to disease…[to understand] superinfection and reinfection.”26 The second goal
was to find ways to prevent the disease immediately after exposure. 27 During
World War II, the United States had provided its troops calomel-sulpha-thiazole
ointment in “pro kits.” (prophylaxis kits). But these were painful to use, so the
PHS wondered if less noxious chemicals or penicillin could be used instead.28“Normal Exposure” and Normal Science
Animal experimentation, especially with rabbits, was long a mainstay in20th century syphilis research, but it could not answer these pressing researchquestions. The PHS researchers wanted to do an experiment where they knew
there would be a good deal of what they politely called “normal exposure” to thedisease in humans. As subjects, they chose the usual quartet of the available andcontained: prisoners in a national penitentiary, inmates in Guatemala’s only
mental hospital, children in the national orphanage, and soldiers in a barracks inthe capital.
Guatemala had legalized prostitution and “allowed prostitutes to pay
regular visits to men in penal institutions,” they explained in their reports. 29
With the cooperation of officials at the Ministry of Justice and the warden of
Guatemala City’s Central Penitentiary, which housed nearly 1500 inmates,
prostitutes who tested positive for either syphilis or gonorrhea were allowed tooffer their services to prison inmates, paid for by U.S. taxpayers through the10

funds of the PHS. In yet another set of experiments, uninfected prostitutes had
inoculum of the diseases placed on their cervixes before the sexual visits began.
Serological tests were done on the inmates before the prostitutes were invited tothe prison and then afterwards to see if infection had occurred. The men weredivided into groups and various chemical and biological prophylaxis techniques
were tested after presumed infection. If positive, the men were then provided
with enough penicillin to produce a cure.
Rabbits, of course, were much easier to manage and manipulate thanhuman beings, as the doctors soon discovered. Not enough of the sexually wellserviced men (the researchers actually timed how long they spent with theprostitutes and thought they acted “like rabbits”), even when plied with alcohol,
seemed to getting syphilis.30 The prostitutes were not easily controlled either, andone researcher lamented, “unfortunately our female donor is leaving her
profession for marriage and is no longer available.”31 The next problem theresearchers ran into regarded the blood tests: too many positives even before
more “normal exposure” occurred. Since they needed men who either had never
had the disease or had already been cured of the disease for their studies, they
discovered their pool was too small for statistical significance to be possible.
Their first answer then became, not abandoning the research, but rather
questioning the tests.
The serology (blood tests) for syphilis had always been a problem, as thebalance between sensitivity and specificity created many false positives and false
negatives. And as the researchers wrote, “the impression is widespread that incertain tropical and subtropical areas there is a high degree of seropositivity
which may not be truly indicative of the prevalence of syphilis.”32 There had long11

been an understanding that the presence of yaws (another treponemal disease)and malaria could affect positive blood tests for syphilis. In Guatemala, while
they were getting positive reactions on the tests, they could find no clinical signs
or spinal fluid evidence of the disease in the men’s bodies.33 To deal with this theresearchers had to do repeat and differing blood tests (drawing 10 cc of blood
every week or biweekly) to see if there had spontaneous cure of the disease, orthe complex pattern on the blood tests (sometimes negative even when thepatient still had the disease) often seen in longstanding syphilis cases.
Even though the inmates were in a prison and there was no mention of
any kind of informed consent, the researchers met resistance. As they reported,“the inmates were for the most part uneducated and superstitious. Most of thembelieved they were being weakened” by the frequent blood withdrawals. Even
though penicillin and iron pills were promised, “in their minds there was noconnection between the loss of a ‘large tube of blood’ and possible benefits of asmall pill.”34 This resistance and the difficulty of managing the prisoners
suggested perhaps the studies on the serologies could be better done elsewhere.
With the cooperation of the Guatemalan government, the researchers
turned to 438 children between the ages of 6 and 16 in the National Orphanage tostudy the blood tests, not to give the children syphilis.35 Three children who
appeared to have signs of congenital syphilis after repeat testing andexamination were given penicillin. Yet another 89 gave positive results on theirtests but showed no signs of the disease clinically. Finding the problem was notwith the antigens used in the tests, the research physicians argued for the use of
specific kinds of blood tests with this kind of population to rule out confounding
factors they could not identify.36
12

They still, however, had not answered the question of whether penicillin
could be used for prophylaxis, not just cure after a definitive positive blood test,in comparison to other chemicals applied directly to the genitalia. Faced with thisand continued concerns with the serologies and reinfection after treatment, theyturned to experiments with the inmates in the country’s only asylum. Here it was
not possible to introduce prostitutes, follow the inmates around to watch andtime their sexual encounters, or gain acceptance by the female patients forphysical examinations. So the researchers planned an inoculation, rather than“sexual exposure,” study, though most of the asylum officials at first thought theinoculation was just another kind of drug.37
As in Tuskegee and throughout the global South in these years, thecooperation was sought with the institution, not the subject-inmates or theirfamilies. And the best way to gain that cooperation was by offering supplies. In
a severely under-funded and overcrowded institution, the PHS supplied “muchneeded anti-convulsant drugs, particularly Dilantin, for the large part of the
population which were epileptic.” They also “bought a refrigerator forbiologicals, a motion picture projector that supplied the sole recreation for theinmates, metal cups, plates and forks to supplement the completely inadequate
supply available.” 38 Individual subjects were offered cigarettes: an entire packet
for inoculation, blood draws or spinal taps and a single cigarette for “clinicalobservation.”39
Creating and Introducing the Inoculum
Making the syphilis inoculum was not easy. One method was to grind up
gummas (syphilitic growth) in the testes of rabbits infected with the Nichols andFrew strains of the bacteria. This proved extremely difficult as rabbits had to be13

flown in from the VDRL in Staten Island to Cutler in Guatemala City; manyneither survived the trip nor developed enough of an infection. In addition, theresearchers tried to make inoculum from scrapings of the chancres on the bodies
of already infected asylum inmates, or men from the army that had a “street
strain,” picked up by local prostitutes not involved in the study itself.40 Once thesample was obtained (by either killing the rabbits to scraping the men’s penile
chancres), the live inoculum had to be made quickly since the spirochetes could
not last more than 45 to 90 minutes outside a body. This left very little time toremove the materials, centrifuge it with fresh homemade beef heart broth, andprepare to deliver it to the subjects. Some inoculum was created with heat-killedbacteria and others with the living spirochetes.
Then the inoculum had to be introduced in the bodies of the subjects. On
the women inmates, because of what was called “local prejudices against maleviewing of the body, even by physicians,” the inoculum was inserted afterneedles were used to abrade the women’s forearms, face or mouth. With themen, the inoculation was often much more direct after what soldiers forgenerations had called the “short arm” inspection. They chose men with “at least
moderately long foreskins [to keep the mucus membranes moist]” and who
could “sit or stand calmly in one spot for several hours.” In the experiments, adoctor held the subject’s penis, pulled back the foreskin, abraded the penis
slightly just short of drawing blood by scraping the skin with a hypodermic
needle, introduced a cotton pledget (or small dressing) and dripped drops of thesyphilitic emulsion onto the pad and through it to the roughed skin on the man’s
penis for at least an hour, sometimes two.

14

This was compared to other forms of introducing the syphilis to the body,
including scraping the forearm before providing the inoculum, or ingestion ofsyphilitic tissue mixed with distilled water, the removal of spinal fluid that wasthen infused with the syphilitic mixture and reintroduced into the body, andvenipunctures of the mixtures into the medial cubital vein of the forearm. 41 In
other studies of prophylaxis at an army barracks, the men were allowed to havesex with uninfected prostitutes, then had the syphilitic inoculum put into themeatus of their penis, told to urinate an hour later and apply differing kinds ofchemical prophylaxis.42 In still other studies, the inoculum was placed on thecervix of prostitutes before they were allowed to have sex with the prisoners.
Cutler’s scientific fervor was impressive, for his sense of the dangers ofsyphilis was acute. The experiments varied the ways the inoculations were done,
whether the syphilitic mixture came from a single chancre, a combination of“donors,” or from the rabbits or the bodies of infected prostitutes and inmatesand soldiers. The researchers gave out differing kinds of chemical prophylaxis tosome of their subjects, or set up other men as controls who had no prophylaxis.
They made sure no one had the disease, or had taken anything for it, before they
began the experimentation. Anyone infected was given penicillin and presumed
to be cured, although there appears to have been no real follow up to determine
this. The studies involved hundreds of men and women, many of whom had
their photographs taken and left in the files.
Deception
Deception was central here, as in Tuskegee. Cutler, writing to famed
penicillin researcher and PHS physician R.C. Arnold in 1947, admitted they were
not really telling very many people that the inoculum contained the syphilis
15bacteria. “As you can imagine,” Cutler reported to his colleague, “ we areholding our breaths, and we are explaining to the patients and others concernedwith but a few key exceptions, that the treatment is a new one utilizing serum
followed by penicillin. This double talk keeps me hopping at time.”43 In a second
letter he repeated his concerns that “a few words to the wrong person here, oreven at home, might wreck it or parts of it….” 44
Leading scientists knew that secrecy, and even law breaking wassometimes necessary to further research. Thomas Rivers, the famed virologist
who led the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research Hospital in New York,
made this clear in his 1967 memoir when he recalled:
Well, all I can say is, it’s against the law to do many things, but the law
winks when a reputable man wants to do a scientific experiment. For example,
the criminal code of the City of New York holds that is a felony to inject a
person with infectious material. Well, I tested out live yellow fever vaccine righton my ward in the Rockefeller Hospital. It was no secret, and I assure you thatthe people in the New York City Department of Health knew it was being
done….Unless the law winks occasionally, you have no progress in medicine.45
Rather than law breaking, in Guatemala the secrecy added to thedifficulties of an already challenging project. Experiments on prophylaxis needed
to determine how much inoculum to give, the time it was allowed to enter the
body and the kinds of “antiseptic agents” and “spirocheticidal” therapy toprovide.46 Keeping track of the hundreds of subjects proved complicated,
especially in the asylum when patient’s names were forgotten, or the staff called
them, for example, “The mute of St. Marcos.” Eliese Cutler, a Wellesley College
alumna and. Cutler’s wife, helped because she “got to know the patients andhelped keep things straight,” while also photographing them and the
inoculations for the record. Some of the inmates were given the syphilis

16emulsions numerous times and another, they lamented, “after scarification, andthe first application of emulsion…fled the room and was not found until 2 hours
later with the pledget still in place.”47 Once it became clear that some of the
inoculum took, researchers were “scrupulous“ they asserted in making sure thepenicillin was given to cure anyone who became infected, and the blood testing
continued.48
The Guatemalan officials had their own demands. They asked Cutler totest and treat men in army barracks, to do surveys of disease in the lowlands,
and to provide more penicillin for the country as part of the price forcooperation. He traded off drugs for malaria at the orphanage for the right tocontinue blood testing. His bosses in the PHS worried, however, that Cutler
might be making too many promises of supplies and developing too ambitious aprogram. The PHS was already fighting a battle at home to continue its work in
venereal disease in the face of the seemingly easy penicillin cure, so the project inGuatemala became difficult to justify.49 After multiple letters Cutler promised tobe careful and promised, “we shall use our supply sparingly so as to have it
available at all times for use in demonstration programs and to build good
will.”50
Cutler remained confident that he had a gold mine for the research. Whilehe was getting pressure from home to justify the abrading and inoculations, hereminded his supervisors “normal sex leads to this kind of trauma and minutelacerations.” Writing to his director supervisor (the famed PHS researcher John
F. Mahoney, who had first demonstrated penicillin’s power over syphilis in1943), Cutler noted “with the opportunity offered here to study syphilis from thestandpoint of pure science just as Chesney studies it in the rabbit it should be17possible to justify the projects in the event of the impossibility of resolution of theprophylactic program.”51
Back in the United States, leading scientists were also hopeful, at first.
Inoculation studies earlier in the century had caused much controversy, and after
the 1910s most of it proceeded on animals, not humans.52 Mahoney told Cutler in
October 1946 “your show is already attracting rather wide and favorable
attention up here. We are frequently asked as to the progress of the work. Doctor
T. B. Turner at Johns Hopkins wants us to check on the pathogenicity in man of
the rabbit spirochete; Doctor Neurath of Duke would like to have us follow
patients with his verification procedures; Doctor Parran [the Surgeon General]and probably Doctor Moore [the leading syphilologist at Hopkins] might drop in
for a visit after the first of the year.” 53 Harry Eagle of the National Cancer
Institute, who had created one of the serology tests for syphilis and did major
work on penicillin, wanted in on the studies as well, since his theory thatpenicillin could be used as a prophylaxis had only been tested in animals, nothumans. He was so angry he was not allowed in on the data that he went to theSurgeon General over it.54
The studies in Guatemala proved problematic, however, both for scientificand political reasons. Mahoney admitted that Cutler’s data were not showing
enough infection could be transferred and that “the circumstance confirms theconclusion drawn from the Terre Haute study that a very important factor otherthan the presence of the organism must be operative in the transmission of thedisease.”55 By the fall of 1947, interest in prophylaxis was waning at home, andMahoney told Cutler that there would be very little money if the study were justfor serologies and penicillin therapy. Yet assumed racial and climatic differences18would require a broader sweep. “A comprehensive study of the reliability ofserology as a diagnostic instrument among aboriginal peoples in tropical
America would require a different approach being used at present.,” Mahoneyargued. ”We would be obliged to canvas the South and Central American
nations, the Mexican Indians, the Indian tribes in the United States, and finally,
the southern negro.”56
Should They Do This?
There was also what bioethicists would later call the “yuck factor” of all
the work.57 PHS physician R.C. Arnold, who supervised Cutler from afar, wasmore troubled than was Cutler about the ethics of the project. Eight months after
the “Doctors’ Trials” at Nuremberg had ended, he confided to Cutler, “I am a bit,in fact more than a bit, leery of the experiment with the insane people. They can
not give consent, do not know what is going on, and if some goody organization
got wind of the work, they would raise a lot of smoke. I think the soldiers would
be best or the prisoners for they can give consent. Maybe I’m tooconservative….Also, how many knew what was going on. I realize that a pt
[patient] or a dozen could be infected, develop the disease and be cured before
anything could be suspected…In the report, I see no reason to say where theywork was done and the type of volunteer.”58
Everyone involved with these studies seemed to know they were treadingon complicated ethical grounds. There had been debates within the National
Research Council in the early 1940s over the ethics of the Terre Haute prison
study on gonorrhea. The PHS knew that such studies had to be methodologicallysound and scientifically fruitful, historian Harry Marks has argued, to justify therisks to prisoners.59 Yet the PHS knew there were very few other ways to get at19this information and to find a way to stop syphilis’ spread through prophylaxis
before the disease was established, not just cure afterward. While the gonorrhea
studies had failed in Terre Haute, they still hoped the new trials on gonorrhea
and syphilis in Guatemala would prove so successful that the risks would havebeen worth it. Malaria specialist G. Robert Coatney, who had done prison
malaria studies, visited the project in February 1947. In reporting to Cutler after
he returned to the States, he explained that he had brought Surgeon General
Thomas Parran up to date and that with a “merry twinkle [that] came into his
eye…[he] said ‘You know, we couldn’t do such an experiment in this country.’”60
Cutler, too, acknowledged that other syphilogists thought humanexperimentation on penicillin as a prevention for syphilis that required
inoculation with the disease “could not be ethically carried out.” Concerned that
discussion of this ethical problem was taking place in the United States just as
information on their grant in Guatemala was published in Journal of the American
Medical Association, Cutler told Mahoney, “it is becoming just as clear to us as it
appears to be to you that it would not be advisable to have too many people
concerned with this work in order to keep down talk and premature writing….
We are just a little bit concerned about the possibility of having anything said
about our program that would adversely affect is continuation.” 61
Mahoney continued to worry. There is a good deal of “gossip” in highplaces about what was going on in Guatemala, he warned Cutler. “I hope you
will not hesitate to stop the experimental work in the event of there being an
undue amount of interest in that phase of the study.” Mahoney, as with Arnold,
seemed less concerned with the prostitute transmission studies taking place in20the prison, but seemed more squeamish about the politics and morality of the
inoculation studies taking place in the asylum.62
There was also the problem that such studies, requiring such effort toinduce infection, could not be duplicated elsewhere. Mahoney told Cutler abouta year and half in to the project, “in syphilis, unless we can transmit the infection
readily and without recourse to scarification or direct implantation, thepossibilities of studying the subject are not bright.” The procedures were, henoted “drastic…[and] beyond the range of natural transmission and will notserve as a basis for the study of a locally applied prophylactic agent.”63 Cutler did
his best to try the studies in multiple ways, to use differing strains of the bacteria,
to move between animal and human donors, and to emphasize therepeatability.64
Even as Cutler continued a number of differing studies, his PHS
supervisors were acutely aware this had to stop. Supplies were limited, and thegrowing use of penicillin diminished political support for this kind of research.
By 1948 Cutler was told to finish up his work, leave the laboratory materials for
the Guatemalan venereal disease control effort, and to come home to be assigned
elsewhere. Eventually, Cutler and his colleagues would write up the serology
findings, and a colleague would publish some details in a Spanish-language
public health journal. 65 Cutler put the final report and the hundreds ofphotographs his wife had taken in his papers, the only record of his decades long
research career left behind.66 The extraordinary efforts he had made to produce
disease and understand various kinds of prophylaxis were buried in the files.
Does this Matter?

21

Moore had been right that the penicillin cure for syphilis left many
unanswered questions about the disease. Although Cutler’s work helped refine
serological testing, and suggested a better chemical prophylaxis, it made little
impact on syphilis research. Cutler would go on to do another inoculation study
five years later in 1953 with the PHS’s Harold Magnuson at New York’s SingSing Prison with sixty-two “human volunteers, ” using as he had in Guatemala
both heat-killed and virulent organisms made from ground up rabbit testes.
These inoculations, however, were done intra-cutaneously and subcutaneously.
No one was abrading the penises of these American men, even in a prison.
Anyone positive was treated, too, with penicillin. These prison studies were doneto answer some questions about re-infection and whether having treated syphilis
and then being provided with the “booster” of new disease created immunity tofurther infection. The extensively quoted and published report on this Sing Sing
work covered much of the history of inoculation syphilis, but it made no mentionof the studies in Guatemala.67
Why then does any of this work in Guatemala matter, besides the arcane
history of Cutler’s links to Terre Haute, Guatemala, Sing Sing and then Tuskegee,and our prurient and horrified sense of what they did without any individual
permission? Do we need to have yet another awful story of the “bad old days” of
medical research before the creation of institutional review boards that arepresumed to protect human subjects? Does this suggest ways those who areconcerned with policy toward subjects should rethink what happened in
Tuskegee?
The Guatemala study matters for two reasons. First, it demonstrates thelinks between periphery and metropole in public health. There was traffic in22

ideas, in practices, in justifications, and in the bodies of researchers that moved
across borders.68 Ways of treating subjects in one place, deceptions allowed inanother, moved around and through the creation of a culture of research. It is notjust public health practices, but also public health research, that crossed overfrom country to country.
Only by understanding this context can we understand the decisions
made by the Public Health Service. While they had their qualms about what was
being done in Guatemala, they allowed that work to continue for two years.
Having made that decision, they might well have regarded the project in
Alabama—which did not infect anyone—as relatively benign.
The story of the work in Guatemala also confirms that fact about noninfecting in the “Tuskegee” Study, since it shows the difficulty of infecting
individuals with syphilis in a scientific project. The lengths that Cutler and hiscolleagues had to go to give the disease to the inmates of the asylum, prison andarmy barracks in Guatemala, and then later in less atrocious ways at Sing Sing,
provides us with a way to say this is not what happened in Tuskegee. Surely, thesurvivors of the Study in Alabama would remember that this happened to them
if there had been such injecting and abrading? In all the records (either in thefederal archives or those at Tuskegee University) of aspirins, iron tonics, and pilljars shipped to Tuskegee there is no mention of money spent for rabbits, forlaboratories to create the inoculums, or efforts to do this.
At the same time, the Guatemala story may make it even easier to imagine
that the government doctors did infect men in Alabama. PHS researchers of theperiod were technically capable of infecting people with syphilis, even if doing
so was more burdensome than the researchers wished. And they were morally
23capable of infecting people with syphilis, for their faith in their cause allowed
them to infect people with this dreadful disease without their consent or evenknowledge—at least when those people lacked power and white skin. These
facts so complicate the Tuskegee story that I deliberately omitted the Guatemalastudies from my book Examining Tuskegee, lest they make it too hard to explainthat the men in Alabama were not infected.
Policy makers often pick and choose differing historical accountings tojustify the decisions they make. Historians have the luxury to wallow in context
and knowable facts, while others make meaning, law and regulations from ourwork. The Study in Tuskegee is often told in a simple manner and frequently
mis-remembered. The inoculation studies in Guatemala put the effort in
Tuskegee in context but can also increase fear of medical research. For if the hue
and cry has been to “remember Tuskegee” to justify control over medical
research, we can only imagine what the sounds might be if these experiments in
Guatemala are also in the portrait. As much as we can be squeamish and angry
over what was being done in these studies, it forces us to consider how we tellthese stories and the policy we make now.69
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Marianne Kasica at the University ofPittsburgh Archives for making the materials available. Thank you to Zachary
Schrag for his edits, encouragement and questions as well as those of mycolleagues when I gave this first as a paper at the 2010 annual meeting of theAmerican Association for the History of Medicine. I also appreciate thecomments of former CDC director David Sencer who did not know the details of
this study that did not take place on his watch.
1
There is a debate, especially at Tuskegee University, over whether the Study
should be called the Tuskegee Study or the United States Public Health Service
Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro at Tuskegee to mesh theresearchers who did the study with the its more formal title. Since it is primarily
know as the Tuskegee Study, I use the term “Tuskegee” in quotes here or justrefer to it as the Study.

24

2

Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 187-203.
3
There was also a debate well into the 1950s over whether penicillin should begiven to those in the late latent stage of the disease. The standard of care was todecide this on an individual basis. This was not done in the Study.
The issue of whether any of the wives/sexual partners of the men were treatedis still controversial. The now available medical records (in the Southeast
Regional National Archives in Morrow, Georgia) have the wives’ treatment
status blacked out to protect their privacy making it impossible to evaluate
claims that there had been some treatment for wives found to be in thecontagious stage. When the Study ended, the PHS agreed to treat 22 wives, 17
children and 2 grandchildren who tested positive for syphilis. For more on how
this was determined, see Susan M. Reverby, “The ‘Tuskegee’ Syphilis Study as a‘Site of Memory,’” in Ralph Katz and Rueben Warren, eds. The Search for the’Legacy’ of the U. S. Public Health Syphilis Study at Tuskegee (Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield, forthcoming).
4
James H. Jones, Bad Blood (New York: Free Press, rev. ed., 1993); Susan M.
Reverby, ed. Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Reverby, Examining Tuskegee.
5
For more details and a timeline of the Study, see
http://www.examiningtuskegee.com. The Study was not a secret. More than adozen research articles were published in varying medical journals about it.
6
Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and other Stories (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1990), p. 2.
7
Sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani, quoted in Patricia Turner and Gary Alan Fine,
Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2004), pp. 58-59.
8Susan M. Reverby, “More than Fact and Fiction: Cultural Memory and theTuskegee Syphilis Study, Hastings Center Report 31 (September-October 2001): 2228.
9
For various versions of this argument see, Thomas G. Benedek and Jonathan
Erlen, “The Scientific Environment of the Tuskegee Study of Syphilis, 1920-1960,”
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45 (Autumn 1999): 1-30; Richard Shweder,“Tuskegee Re-Examined,” Spiked online. January 8, 2004; Robert W. White,“Unraveling the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis,” Archives of Internal
Medicine 160 (March 13, 2000):585-98.
10
Joan Sherwood, “Syphilization: Human Experimentation in the Search for a
Syphilis Vaccine in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Medicine 54(July 1999): 364-386 and Susan E. Lederer, Subjected to Science (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995).
11
Marcos Cueto, The Value of Health: A History of the Pan American HealthOrganization (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Health Organization, 2007)
argues the immediate post war era was a major point in “inter-American” publichealth exchanges; see also Pan American Sanitary Bureau, The Pan American
Sanitary Bureau: A History of its Organization, Function and Activities (Mexico City:
PASB, 1946). On the expansion of social welfare during the liberalization ofpolitics in Guatemala between World War II and before the CIA backed coup in25

1954, see Susanne Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala (Boulder: Westview Pres, 1991,
pp. 21-40.
12
Jan Ackerman, “Obituary: John Charles Cutler/Pioneer in Preventing Sexual
Diseases,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 12, 2003, http://www.postgazette.com/obituaries/20030212cutler0212p3.asp, accessed February 24, 2003.
For more on Cutler’s career, see Reverby, Examining Tuskegee, pp. 144-151.
13
Pubmed lists his name on 58 articles published between 1946 and 1995.
14“The Deadly Deception,” NOVA. Videotape, PBS. Directed by Denise DiIanni.
Boston: WGBH Educational Foundation Films for the Humanities and Sciences,
1993.
15
Nancy Tomes, “Introduction: Imperial Medicine and Public Health,” in Colonial
Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, eds. Alfred W. McCoy
and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), pp.
273-276.
16
Harry F. Dowling, Fighting Infection: Conquests of the 20th Century (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 125-157; John Parascandola, Sex, Sin andScience (New York: Praeger Press, 2008).
17
Quoted in Reverby, Examining Tuskegee, p. 139. The left over questions about
the biology of syphilis have resurfaced with those who think there is aconnection between untreated syphilis and HIV/AIDS. See Harris L. Coulter
AIDS and Syphilis—The Hidden Link (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1993) andColeman Jones, “Challenging Dissident Dogma: The Role of Infectious CoFactors in AIDS,”
http://breakfornews.com/aidsmyth./news/000529syphilisdebate.htm, accessed March 19, 2010.
18
John C. Cutler, “Current Concepts of Prophylaxis,” Bulletin of the New York
Academy of Medicine 52 (October 1976):866-896. For the counter view to theposition on prophylaxis taken by Cutler and the PHS, see Joseph Earle Moore,
The Modern Treatment of Syphilis (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 2nd edition,1943), pp. 564-567. On tensions between the PHS doctors and Moore see John F.
Mahoney to John C. Cutler, April 19, 1948, Box 1, Folder 13, John C. Cutler
Papers, University Archives, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, hereafterreferred to as the Cutler Papers.
19
Inoculum was both cultured and taken from the penis of one infected man andput into the penis of another. See John F. Mahoney et. al.,“Experimental
Gonococcic Urethritis in Human Volunteers,” American Journal of Syphilis,
Gonorrhea and Venereal Diseases 30 ( January1946): 1-39. For more on the policy
debate over the Terre Haute research, see Harry M. Marks, The Progress ofExperiment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 100-105. On a
revived interest in prison research see Institute of Medicine, Ethical Considerations
for Research Involving Prisoners (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Medicine, 2006);
Barron H. Lerner, “Subjects or Objects? Prisoners and Human Experimentation,”
New England Journal of Medicine 356 (May 3, 2007): 1806-07.
20
Jeanne L. Brand, “The U.S. Public Health Service and International Health,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63 (Winter 1989), p. 582-583.
21
Hugh S. Cumming, who had been the Surgeon General when the “Tuskegee”
Study began, served as the director of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau from1936 (when he left the PHS) to 1947, see Ralph Chester Williams, The United
26

States Public Health Service 1798 to 1950 (Washington, D.C. : Commissioned
Officers Association of the U.S. P.H.S., 1951), p. 446.
22
Marcos Cueto, “Introduction,” in Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller
Foundation and Latin America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p.
xiii.
23
See Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); Stephen
Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in
Guatemala (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); David McBride,
Missions for Science (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
24
George Cheever Shattuck, “Syphilis and Yaws in Guatemala,” in A Medical
Survey of the Republic of Guatemala, ed. George Cheever Shattuck (Washington:
Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1938), p. 142. Shattuck also summarizes
medical beliefs about racial differences in the virility and existence of syphilis,
see “Appendix B, “The Clinical Case of Syphilis in Various Races,” pp. 153-156;
see also George Cheever Shattuck, “Lesions of Syphilis in American Indians,”
American Journal of Tropical Medicine 18 (1938): 577-586.
On the use of race to matter and not matter, see Reverby, Examining
Tuskegee. See also Chester North Frazier and Li Hung-Chiung, Racial Variations
in Immunity to Syphilis: A Study of the Disease in the Chinese, White and Negro Races(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).
25“Untitled Report,” February 24, 1954, Folder 1, Box 1, Cutler Papers.
26
Ibid. p. 2 and Sherwood, “Syphilization.”27
On the search for a better prophylactic, see R. C. Arnold and John C. Cutler,“Experimental Studies to Develop Local Prophylactic Agents Against Syphilis,”
British Journal of Venereal Diseases 32 (1956): 34-36. For directions on how to use aWorld War II pro-kit if infection was suspected, see http://meddept.com/vd.php, accessed March 23, 2010.
28
Untitled Report,” p. 6.
29“Untitled Report,” p. 7.
30John C. Cutler to R.C. Arnold, June 5, 1947, Box 1, Folder 13, Cutler Papers. All
correspondence in this folder unless otherwise noted.
31
Elliott L. Harvlow to John M. Mahoney, June 30, 1947.
32
Sacha Levitan et. al., “Clinical and Serologic Studies with Reference to Syphilis
in Guatemala, Central America,” American Journal of Syphilis, Gonorrhea, andVenereal Diseases 36 (July 1952): 379.
33
Cutler believed that widespread liver disease in Guatemala due to malnutrition
might also affect the tests.
34“Untitled Report,” p. 16.
35
Ibid., p. 5 and Levitan, et.al., “Clinical and Serologic Studies,” p. 379.
36
Levitan, et.al., “Clinical and Serologic Studies,” p. 387. They argued that“significantly higher percentages of positive and doubtful reactions wereobtained from Kahn and Mazzini tests than with the Kolmer test and the VDRL
slide test.” Today, syphilis serological diagnosis requires a reactive
nontreponemal test confirmed with a treponemal test.
37“Untitled Report,” p. 24
38
Ibid. p. 25.
39
Ibid, p. 32.

27

40

“Part II Final Syphilis Report” discussion of the various strains of the disease
used, p. 1-5, Box 1, Folder 2, Cutler Papers.
41“Untitled Report,” p. 48. See also instructions from R.C. Arnold to Cutler, July21, 1947. On the history of various kinds of inoculation techniques, see Harold J.
Magnuson et. al, “Inoculation Syphilis in Human Volunteers,” Medicine 35(February 1956): 33-82. On the difference with gonorrhea inoculation, see
Mahoney et. al. , “Experimental Gonococcic Urethritis in Human Volunteers.”
Cutler was a co-author on both of these articles. Prison studies seem to use theterm “human volunteers” in their titles.
42
Cutler to Mahoney, December 27, 1947
43
Cutler to Arnold, June 5, 1947.
44
Cutler to Arnold, June 27, 1947.
45
Saul Benison, Tom Rivers: Reflections on a Life in Medicine and Science, An Oral
History Memoir prepared by Saul Benison (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1967),
p.187.
46
John C. Cutler, “An Experimental Resurvey of the Basic Factors Concerned in
Prophlyaxis in Syphilis,”Unpuplished typescript, Box 1, Folder 9, Cutler Papers.
47“Part III Final Syphilis Report,”p.25, Box 1, Folder 3, Cutler Papers.
48“Untitled Report,” pp. 34-39.
49
Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet (New York: Oxford, 1987, 1993). By 1950, the
VDRL stopped all research on chemical prophylaxis, see John C. Cutler, “Current
Concepts of Prophylaxis,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 52(October 1976): 886-896.
50
Mahoney to Cutler, November 18, 1946; Cutler to Mahoney, November 30,
1946; Mahoney to Cutler, December 18, 1946.
51
Cutler to Mahoney, September 18, 1947.
52
Susan E. Lederer , Subjected to Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995, pp 82-87 on Hideyo Noguchi’s controversial syphilis experiments at
the Rockefeller Institute in New York in 1911.
53
John F. Mahoney to John C. Cutler, October 15, 1946.
54
Mahoney to Cutler, May 5, 1947. Eagle was then working at the National
Cancer Institute and this may have been part of a turf battle with the PHS. Thereis no evidence that Eagle ever participated in the Guatemala work.
55
Mahoney to Cutler, August 11, 1987. Mahoney concluded: “It is becoming
obvious also that experimental infection cannot be produced with sufficientfrequency to assure an adequate background for the study of prophylaxis.”
56
Mahoney to Cutler, September 8, 1947.
57
Jussi Niemela, “ What Puts the ‘Yuck’ in the ‘Yuck Factor,” Bioethics, online 25
February 2010,
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123303185/abstract?CRETRY=1&
SRETRY=0, accessed March 25, 2010.
58
R.C. Arnold to Cutler, April 19, 1948, Box 1, Folder 17, Cutler Papers.
59
The National Research Council, established in 1916, oversees scientific researchpolicy for the U.S. government and had a subcommittee of the Committee on
Medical Research during World War II specifically focused on venereal diseaseresearch, see Marks, The Progress of Experiment, pp. 100-105.
60
G. Robert Coatney to Cutler, February 17, 1947, Box 1, Folder 17, Cutler
Papers.
28

61

Cutler to Mahoney, May 17, 1947, Box 1, Folder 11.
Mahoney to Cutler, June 30, 1947. The Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg was
taking place between December 9, 1946 and August 20, 1947, although neither
Mahoney nor Cutler mentioned it in their correspondence.
63
Mahoney to Cutler, September 8, 1947, Box 1, Folder 13.
64
Arnold to Cutler, July 30, 1947, Box 1, Folder 11.
65
Sacha Levitan et. al, “Clinical and Serologic Studies with Reference to Syphilis
in Guatemala Central America I,” American Journal of Syphilis, Gonorrhea, andVenereal Diseases 36 (July 1952): 379-87; John C. Cutler et. al., “Studies on the
Comparative Behavior of Various Serologic Tests for Syphilis II,” ibid. 36(November 1952): 533-44; Joseph Portnoy et. al, “Clinical and Serologic Studies
with Reference to Syphilis in Guatemala, Central American III,” ibid. 36(November 1952): 566-70.
66
Juan Funes et. al, “Serologic and Clinical Studies in Syphilis in Guatemala,Central America, II,” Boletin de la Oficina Sanitaria Panamericana 34 (January 1953):
14-18;
67
Magnuson et.al, “Inoculation Syphilis.” One of the other physicians on thisproject was Sidney Olansky, who had directed the work in Tuskegee in the
1950s. For more on Olansky and Cutler, see Reverby, Examining Tuskegee.
68
See Warwick Anderson,” Pacific Crossings: Imperial Logics in United States’
Public Health Programs,” in Colonial Crucible, pp. 277-287.
69
The issue of human subject protection is even more relevant now as thepercentage of foreign trials for drugs in the United States has become even morecommon. See Gardiner Harris, “Concern over Foreign Trials for Drugs Sold in
U.S.” New York Times, June 21, 2010, p. A14; Adriana Petryna, When Experiments
Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2009).
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