Middletown grad uncovers shocking history: US gave Guatemalans syphilis

MIDDLETOWN — It was at 14, at Middletown High School, that Susan Reverby fell in love with history.

"I dragged my mother to Philadelphia to see where Benjamin Franklin lived," for a ninth-grade paper, said Reverby. "I always knew: You had to go to the source."

Back then, she was Susan Mokotoff, and her mother, Gert Mokotoff, was the one who chauffeured her on her Ben Franklin research mission.

Reverby's research philosophy — go to the source — led her to a discovery that has put her in the national media spotlight: In 1946-48, U.S. researchers intentionally infected Guatemalan inmates and mental patients with venereal diseases in order to test treatments. Reverby's discovery has sparked apologies to Guatemala and its people from President Barack Obama and two Cabinet secretaries.

Reverby, the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and a professor of women's and gender studies at Wellesley College, is also a medical historian, the author of well-respected books on the Tuskegee syphilis study — the one where the U.S. Public Health Service studied for 40 years — but did not treat — hundreds of black men who had syphilis.

The Tuskegee and Guatemala cases show how past prejudices allowed minorities and people with mental or psychiatric disabilities to be treated as test subjects and allowed researchers to perform tests, without individual consent, that would horrify most people today.

While researching Tuskegee, Reverby visited archives at the University of Pittsburgh. There, she found a collection of papers from Dr. John C. Cutler, a PHS doctor involved in the Tuskegee study in the 1960s.

"I opened the box," Reverby said. "I saw the words 'inoculation syphilis.'"

The Tuskegee doctors failed to treat their subjects, but didn't infect them, Reverby said. As she looked through the Cutler papers, Reverby realized they documented a forgotten experiment carried out by Cutler and others in Guatemala from 1946-48. With the knowledge of U.S. Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Sanitary Bureau and the Guatemalan government, researchers had given syphilis to 696 prison inmates, soldiers, and mental patients, using prostitutes or bacteria introduced into abraded skin. The infected were treated with penicillin or chemicals. The researchers never sought consent from the subjects. That lack of consent raised ethical issues even at the time. Reverby's full paper on Cutler's actions in Guatemala will be published in January in the Journal of Policy History.

"It seems to have hit the country at a very difficult time," she said. "It is a pretty awful story."

The national attention has been a surprise, Reverby said.

"I have a clear story to tell" she said, adding that she tried to be "judicious about telling it," so people get it.

"Mom had a great line: She said if you're over your student's head by an inch, it might as well be a mile."