The Tuskegee and Guatemala Syphilis Studies Were Racist

Some of the most unsettling examples of institutional  racism have involved medicine, such as when the U.S. government conducted syphilis research on marginalized groups (poor black men in the American south and vulnerable Guatemalan citizens) with disastrous results. Such experiments challenge the idea that racism simply involves isolated acts of prejudice. In fact, the racism that results in long-lasting oppression of people from minority backgrounds is typically perpetuated by institutions. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study In 1932, the United States Public Health Service partnered with educational establishment the Tuskegee Institute to study black men with syphilis in Macon County, Georgia. Most of the men were poor sharecroppers. By the time the study ended 40 years later, a total of 600 black men had enrolled in the experiment. It was called the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Medical researchers swayed the men to participate in the study by enticing them with medical exams, rides to and from the clinics, meals on examination days, free treatment for minor ailments, and guarantees that provisions would be made after their deaths in terms of burial stipends paid to their survivors. There was just one problem: Even when penicillin became the main treatment for syphilis in 1947, researchers neglected to use the medication on the men in the Tuskegee study. In the end, dozens of study participants died and infected their spouses, sexual partners, and children with syphilis as well. The Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs created a panel to review the study and in 1972, determined that it was ethically unjustified. The panel determined that researchers failed to provide participants with informed consent, namely that test subjects were to remain untreated for syphilis. In 1973, a class action suit was filed on behalf of the enrollees in the study that resulted in them winning a $9 million settlement. Moreover, the U.S. government agreed to give free medical services to the survivors of the study and their families. Guatemala Syphilis Experiment Until 2010, it remained widely unknown that the U.S. Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau partnered with the Guatemalan government to conduct medical research between 1946 and 1948. During this time, 1,300 Guatemalan prisoners, sex workers, soldiers, and mental health patients were intentionally infected with sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid. What’s more, just 700 of the Guatemalans exposed to STDs received treatment. A total of 83 individuals ultimately died from complications that may have been a direct result of the questionable research paid for by the U.S. government to test the effectiveness of penicillin as an STD treatment. Susan Reverby, a women’s studies professor at Wellesley College, uncovered the U.S. government’s unethical medical research in Guatemala while researching the Tuskegee Syphilis Study of the 1960s, in which researchers willfully failed to treat black men with the illness. It turns out that Dr. John Cutler played a key role in both the Guatemalan experiment and the Tuskegee experiment. The medical research conducted on members of the Guatemalan population stands out as especially egregious, given that the year before experiments there began, Cutler and other officials also conducted STD research on prisoners in Indiana. In that case, however, researchers informed the inmates what the study entailed. In the Guatemalan experiment, none of the test subjects gave their consent, a violation of their rights. In 2012, a U.S. court threw out a lawsuit Guatemalan citizens filed against the U.S. government over the unethical medical research. Wrapping Up Because of the history of medical racism, people  of color continue to distrust health care providers. This can result in non-white people delaying medical treatment or avoiding it altogether, creating an entirely new set of challenges for a group plagued with a legacy of racism. Sources About the USPHS Syphilis Study. Tuskegee University, 2019, Tuskegee, AL. Monastersky, Richard. Court dismisses suit over unethical US experiments. Springer Nature Limited, June 15, 2012.