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Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts discovered that in the 1940's, the U.S. Public Health Service, the NIH, the Pan-American Health Sanitary Bureau and the Guatemalan government experimented without consent on male prisoners and female patients at the Guatemalan National Mental Health Hospital. These innocent people were injected with or exposed to gonorrhea and syphilis. Then, many of them were treated. According to MSNBC, these tests never provided any useful information.
Now that this information has surfaced, the U.S. has issued an apology to the people of Guatemala.
I wish it was a new thing to feel shocked about.
I wish we didn't have such a deep history of experimenting on a vulnerable, unsuspecting populace. We do not have to go as far as the shores of a foreign land to find this kind of dreadful disregard for humanity. For many years, similar stories of abuse have emerged, perhaps the most famous of all is The Tuskegee Syphilis Study which was conducted for forty years beginning in 1932 and officially ending in 1972.
Image: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons
The United States Public Health Service (note carefully, their name and their personnel also appear in the Guatemala experiments) monitored African-American men with syphilis to watch the progression of the disease until the men died. They wanted to see if syphilis affected them differently than it did white men, but didn't have a similar plan to test white men.
The African-American men in the test were told they were being treated. They were not. They were just having their decline to death watched and recorded.
In the book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, the noted scholar Harriet A. Washington points out this and a long history of racist medical abuse.
Wikipedia chronicles it this way (note -- the underline below is mine):
By 1947 penicillin had become the standard treatment for syphilis. ...the Tuskegee scientists continued the study, withholding penicillin and information about it from the patients. In addition, scientists prevented participants from accessing syphilis treatment programs available to others in the area. The study continued, under numerous supervisors, until 1972, when a leak to the press resulted in its termination. Victims included numerous men who died of syphilis, wives who contracted the disease, and children born with congenital syphilis.
A stunning interview with Ms. Washington, in which she details many such atrocities can be found on the NPR Democracy Now site.
It took until 1997, twenty-five years after the study was exposed and halted (in 1972 by a low-level Polish immigrant interviewer who worked for the Public Health Service who kept writing letters over a period of years until someone finally listened) for President Bill Clinton to finally apologize to the 8 men remaining from the 399 victims of the Tuskegee Experiment. The apology can be found here.
In a review of Eileen Welsome's Pultizer Prize winning Plutonium Files, further abuse is chronicled -- literally thousands of incidents where people were used as human guinea pigs without their knowledge or consent:
Welsome's remarkable investigation spans the 1930s to the 1990s ... She gives a voice to such innocents as Helen Hutchison, a young woman who entered a prenatal clinic in Nashville for a routine checkup and was instead given a radioactive "cocktail" to drink; Gordon Shattuck, one of several boys at a state school for the developmentally disabled in Massachusetts who was fed radioactive oatmeal for breakfast; and Maude Jacobs, a Cincinnati woman suffering from cancer and subjected to an experimental radiation treatment designed to help military planners learn how to win a nuclear war.
A look at the CIA's project called MK-ULTRA is equally chilling. The goal here was mind control through the use of drugs, especially hallucinogens. In 1973, Richard Helms, then the head of the CIA ordered the destruction of all the files related to MK-ULTRA. However, not all of them had been correctly filed, and some survived. Prisoners, hospital patients, mentally ill patients, and others were given drugs without consent, often high doses of hallucinogens over days in length, which sometimes resulted in permanent brain damage.
Covert American medical experimentation on the helpless, the prisoners, the disenfranchised continued. From serious threats to life to "dusting" the NY Subway with a very mild bacteria to
