I was not prepared to find out that the Tuskegee Experiment was merely one of a series of arguably even more fucked up experiments.
So uh, prepare yourself.
Today’s Moment of Science… The merchant of syphilis.
One of a few diseases nicknamed ‘the great imitator,’ the presentation of syphilis varies wildly. After a couple messy steps of chancres and rashes and fevers, the Treponema pallidum bacteria generally progresses silently over the course of years or decades before letting utter fuck chaos fly through the central nervous system.
Or causes life threatening meningitis within just a few months of infection. Or presents with a mild rash followed by… nothing.
To doctors in a time when some of the most accurate medical testing involved piss tasting, this inconsistent presentation contributed to the uncertainty regarding when syphilis first crawled into humanity’s collective dickhole (my band name). A long-held theory was that it traveled back to Europe with Columbus, bacterial retribution for the smallpox blankets. However, evidence suggests that a genetic cousin of syphilis was kicking around the Old World before the Columbian exchange.
Earlier outbreaks may have been diagnosed as leprosy, elephantiasis, smallpox, or a fucking rash. It’s also been speculated that pre-Columbus the disease was milder in Europe, but something new or mutated came back. Whatever happened, an imperial buttload of Europeans were hit with the first documented outbreak of ejaculate brain fever in 1495.
So, Dr. John Charles Cutler.
Born in 1915, he wasn’t even an adult when the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male started in 1932. 399 Black men with latent syphilis and 200 who tested negative (as a control group) were observed in exchange for services including free medical care. True, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin a few years earlier, but it wouldn’t become a readily available treatment until the 1940s.
Volunteers weren’t told they had syphilis or the real nature of the study. Even before modern medical ethical codes or a standard treatment, there was just no fucking excuse. They were “being treated for bad blood,” a vague colloquialism referring to multiple illnesses.
Someone will inevitably claim this whole disgusting chapter of history wasn’t racist, but one of the doctors involved said “the rather low intelligence of the Negro population, depressed economic conditions, and the common promiscuous sex relations not only contribute to the spread of syphilis but the prevailing indifference with regards to treatment.” Which was quite the statement, given that the Black participants were enticed into participating with a promise of… medical treatment.
Stick a pin in that, but first, Cutler. After graduating from medical school in 1941, he joined the US Public Health Service and went to conduct research at the Terre Haute prison. For $100 and a recommendation to the parole board, 241 prisoners took that offer in exchange for having gonorrhea treatments tested on them. These prisoners didn’t have gonorrhea though, which meant they were consenting to being infected. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and argue that giving people diseases with no known cure to (maybe) get out of prison earlier would break a few protocols today.
Fortunately, Dr. Cutler’s method of baking up the clap in a petri dish for dick marinade didn’t result in many cases of gonorrhea. Since they couldn’t test treatments on patients who weren’t sick, the whole thing was scrapped.
That’s when he went to Guatemala.
From 1946 to 1948, Cutler led studies on multiple bacterial STDs. Like the Terre Haute experiments, people were deliberately infected; unlike the prisoners, those infected were told almost nothing. Estimates of the number of victims are as high as 5,000 people.
Prisoners, sex workers, patients at mental institutes, and even goddamn orphans were used for testing penicillin’s ability to prevent syphilis. In gonorrhea experiments, sex workers were paid by Uncle Sam to spread the STI directly to Guatemalan soldiers. It was also transmitted via injection into unsuspecting patients’ spines. Despite the availability of penicillin, it seems like maybe half of people infected were treated.
US surgeon general Dr. Thomas Parran said in a letter to Cutler, “you know, we couldn’t do such an experiment in this country.” Excuse me I need to scream into a pillow.
After being appointed assistant surgeon general, Cutler headed to Tuskegee in the 1960s. At this point, we knew how the fuck to treat syphilis. We knew what the fuck the disease course looked like. We had about thirty fucking years of data from Tuskegee and so much ethically goddamn murky data from Terre Haute and Guatemala. But that fucking cuntwhistle Cutler decided the show must go on, opting not to treat or disclose information about their illness to the participants.
In 1972, forty years after the experiment started, a leak to the press told the world what happened at Tuskegee. It was far too late for many. Some of the volunteers’ wives had been infected, passing congenital syphilis onto their kids. Over a hundred had died, with neurosyphilis coming around the corner for even more of them.
A $10 million out of court settlement was reached for the Tuskegee victims. Lawsuits on behalf of the victims of the Guatemala study were dismissed largely on grounds of sovereign immunity, which sounds like legal jargon for ‘the government did it so fuck you.’
Cutler was a company man until the day he died, one of few who continued to defend their actions at Tuskegee. In a 1993 documentary, he said “it was important that they were supposedly untreated, and it would be undesirable to go ahead and use large amounts of penicillin to treat the disease, because you’d interfere with the study.” This motherfucker.
This has been your Moment of Science, in desperate need of a shower. Of bleach. For my brain.
To support my work but more importantly help pay for the therapy I so desperately need from writing this column, head to patreon.com/scibabe.
Join the discussion!