Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment: Consent Is Not A Thing

What happens when a group of doctors decides that the best way to study a sexually transmitted disease is to make absolutely sure their patients have it?

In this episode of Torture: A Dark History, Kevin Young and Dan Hourigan uncover one of the darkest chapters in the history of American medicine: the Guatemalan Syphilis Experiments. Beginning with historian Susan Reverby’s discovery of John Cutler’s research papers in 2003, we trace how a secret medical experiment conducted in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948 deliberately exposed prisoners, soldiers, psychiatric patients, sex workers, and others to syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid.

We follow the story from the rise of syphilis as a major public health concern after World War I, through the discovery of penicillin, and into the increasingly disturbing experiments carried out by American researchers who wanted controlled subjects for their research. What began with attempts to study sexual transmission eventually involved deliberate infections, repeated exposures, painful procedures, and subjects who were often never told what was actually being done to them.

We’ll also look at some of the individual victims whose stories survived in the records, including Berta, a psychiatric patient who was deliberately infected with multiple diseases before her death, and the children who were subjected to medical procedures despite never being deliberately infected with syphilis.

And naturally, Kevin and Dan bring their dark sense of humor to a story where the phrase “medical experiment” somehow manages to become more horrifying with every page of documentation.

This is dark history, medical experimentation, true crime, the history of syphilis, and one of the most disturbing chapters in the history of American medicine.

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