Horny History: Guatemalans… People or Test Subjects?
It’s real history, as told by some horny dude in my inbox and me.
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This post contains sensitive content on racism, medical abuse, graphic medical descriptions and inhumane treatment. Reader discretion is advised.
Between 1946-1948 the American government deliberately infected Guatemalans with syphilis and other venereal diseases. The study, led by Dr. John Cutler, included intentionally infecting sex workers, soldiers, prisoners, leprosy patients and patients at a mental hospital with syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid, as well as performing serology tests on orphans. More than 5,500 people were used as test subjects, of which at least 1,308 of them were intentionally infected.
They infected foreign people to attempt to find preventative measures, so that when American men were abroad at war, they could fuck and fuck the local women without worrying about silly little consequences like syphilis. Previously, soldiers were given kits of mercury based ointment which they were supposed to apply to their penises, uncomfortably. The soldiers didn’t want to use the mercury.
Scientists at the time Dr. Cutler began his experiment knew that syphilis could be cured with penicillin. In the Guatemalan study the United States Public Health Service wanted to see if penicillin could get rid of venereal diseases before symptoms became present, see which chemicals could be used as prophylaxes, establish better serology tests, and test the effects of different dosages of penicillin.
The answers were on the minds of many scientists. To study such a thing though would be “ethically impossible,” the other scientists said. “To get the answer quickly, it would be necessary to shoot living syphilis germs into human bodies . . . Then half the human rabbits would be given penicillin. The other half would not.” Who would conduct such an experiment?
“Berta was a female patient in the psychiatric hospital. Her age and the illness that brought her to the hospital are unknown. In February 1948, Berta was injected in her left arm with syphilis. A month later, she developed scabies (an itchy skin infection caused by a mite). Several weeks later, Dr. Cutler noted that she had also developed red bumps where he had injected her arm, lesions on her arms and legs, and her skin was beginning to waste away from her body. Berta was not treated for syphilis until three months after her injection. Soon after, on August 23, Dr. Cutler wrote that Berta appeared as if she was going to die, but he did not specify why. That same day he put gonorrheal pus from another male subject into both of Berta’s eyes, as well as in her urethra and rectum. He also re-infected her with syphilis. Several days later, Berta’s eyes were filled with pus from the gonorrhea, and she was bleeding from her urethra. On August 27, Berta died.” Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues
“Pure science,” said Dr. Cutler.
(As a reminder I do not know these men. These are right wing men who are messaging a satirical Facebook profile of me as a conservative.)
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Contestant A
Inoculates of syphilis and gonorrhea put onto the cervixes of women whose bodies were then used for a man, multiple men’s pleasure. Paid for by the taxpayers of the United States of America. There is so much more.
Contestant B
Poor Contestant B. He was too young to understand the intricacies of a history lesson. There is still, so much more.
Contestant C
The doctors also tried other methods of forcibly giving imprisoned people diseases, such as forcing them to swallow “a mixture of testicular tissue and supernatant fluid” and injecting diseases via intravenous inoculation.
“It is becoming just as clear to us as it appears to be to you that is would not be advisable to have too many people concerned with this work in order to keep down talk.”
Some were artificially inoculated. Some were given diseases through sex workers that the doctors had inoculated. The doctors argued over how often the women should be forced to have sex with men. Dr. Cutler thought they should have intercourse with different men sometimes less than a minute apart. From his notes he documented one woman who was forced to have sex with 8 soldiers in 71 minutes, and another “as many as 20 men in the course of 3 to 4 hours.” They were not allowed to wash in between the men. Others thought this might be too much for the women, and suggested several hours apart, or just several times a day. Dr. Cutler didn’t listen.
The prisoners that understood the experiments didn’t want the tests done on them, not even the blood tests. “Most of them believed that they were being wreaked by the weekly or biweekly withdrawals of 10 cc. of blood and complained that they were getting insufficient food to replace it.” That they did not want the testing, the doctors speculated was because “the inmates were for the most part uneducated and superstitious.”
The people in the mental hospital proved to be much easier to control. “The patients often attempted to make numerous trips.” Dr. Cutler recognized that the hospital did not have enough staff to properly care for the people and that the patients responded positively to any attention. Calling it a “pathetic anxiety to participate” he wrote that “the inmates were starved for attention and recognition as individuals.” The cigarettes certainly helped too. “We gave American and locally made cigarettes very freely to the patients as we worked with them.” “Without the availability of cigarettes the type of patient management that we were able to achieve, we feel, would have been impossible.”
Even so, the patients didn’t like the pain. “After scarification, and the first application of emulsion,” one man “fled the room and was not found until 2 hours later with the pledget still in place.”
To repay them for helping to control the patients, the staff too were given “an occasional pack of American cigarettes.” Some were paid “a few extra dollars as for notifying of a death, assisting at an autopsy, or assisting during treatment of a large group of patients.”
Although Dr. Cutler did at first donate much needed supplies to the hospital, the PHS wrote him that he was promising too many supplies and spending too much money. Cutler promised to only give when people were watching for demonstration “to build good will.” At the orphanage he traded drugs to treat malaria for the right to blood test the children.
It’s worth mentioning, because Dr. Cutler gives special acknowledgment to the skills of his photographer wife, that the files full of pictures of victims and close up pictures of the men’s penises were all taken by her. It was a family business. She learned the names of the patients to help identify them, because some at the hospital didn’t know their name, or they went by multiple names. Then she took pictures of their intentionally infected bodies and penises. The penises I won’t show you.
Despite his success at giving so many syphilis, gonnorhea or chancroid, Dr. Cutler wasn’t able produce enough consistent results for the Public Health Service. They weren’t giving enough people diseases. Not even other, stronger, strains of syphilis could bring the results the doctors needed. Additionally, they struggled with false positives and negatives in their serology tests. Dr. Cutler had to pack it up and head home to the United States.
These men knew what they were doing was wrong. A letter to Dr. Cutler tells of how the US Surgeon General “is very much interested in the project and a merry twinkle came into his eye when he said, ‘You know, we couldn’t do such an experiment in this country.’” Others warned Dr. Cutler there was gossip about Guatemala. “I hope you will not hesitate to stop the experiment work in the event of there being an undue amount of interest in that phase of the study.” That phase being the men giving syphilis to people who weren’t mentally cognizant and didn’t even know their own names.
Dr. Cutler diminished concerns about his experiments. In response to people upset about the scarification, abrasion and inoculation, he said, “normal sex leads to this kind of trauma and minute lacerations.” What difference was it really that instead it was the hands of doctors scraping men’s penises and the cervixes of women?
The people didn’t consent, but their government and those in charge of the places the subjects were imprisoned consented. Due to the repayment of goods they received, many in charge of the institutions praised Dr. Cutler. “Distinguished Dr. Cutler. . . . You have really been a philanthropist,” wrote Dr. Roberto Robles Chinchille of the penitentiary. He referred to Dr. Cutler as “your nobleness.”
Cutler’s career continued to flourish in undesirable ways. From 1953-1956, he participated in inoculating more people at the Sing Sing Prison in New York. These people were inoculated with syphilis too, however they were all treated and the American men’s penises were left unharmed with no abrasion. He later joined the Tuskegee syphilis study in which Black men with late stage syphilis were monitored without treatment, to watch the effects of the disease.
His 2003 obituary read, “He was a much beloved professor both at the graduate school of Public health and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.”
After Susan Reverby uncovered the documents on Cutler’s Guatemalan syphilis study, she released a paper detailing the atrocity. On October 1st, 2010 an apology was given to Guatemala by President Barack Obama. A class action suit was filed against the US Government in 2011 but it was dismissed the following year. There would be no compensation to the victims. Instead, the US promised to give 1.8 million to “improve the treatment and prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases . . . in Guatemala and to further strengthen ethical training on human research protections.”
In 2015 the victims filed a class action suit against John’s Hopkins University, Rockefeller Foundation and Bristol Myers Squibb. The victims were mainly spouses, children and other descendants of people who had been intentionally infected, and the school children who had serology testing done without consent. In 2024 that suit was dismissed as well.
Funding to Guatemala for HIV programs was recently cut by Donald Trump who on paper allowed the provision of some HIV services, but in practice cut staff leaving clinics unable to provide.
“It is imperative that the least possible be known and said about this project, for a few words to the wrong person here, or even at home, might wreck it or parts of it.” Dr. John Cutler
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Sources:
If you want to read about it:
Normal Exposure Susan Reverby
Documents of John Cutler U.S. Public Health Service
First, Do No Harm: The US Sexually Transmitted Disease Experiments in Guatemala Michael A Rodriguez, Robert García
“Ethically Impossible” STD Research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948 Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues
The Guatemala Inoculation Experiments Lydia Dixon
Victims Again: Litigation Ends on the US Public Health Service Syphilis Studies in Guatemala Paul A. Lombardo
Impact of US funding cuts on HIV programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean UNAIDS
Penicillin The Escanaba Daily Press, April 19th, 1947
You should also read:
The above piece is older but it references this story on Guatemala. This is because my original story on Guatemala came out a few years ago, but I’ve now rewritten it to be much longer, with two new men.
This was horrifying but I appreciate your sharing it. It’s so important to tell these stories.
Jfc