Locating the “Pure Indian”: Blood, Eugenics, and Medical Ethics in the USPHS Syphilis Experiments in Guatemala
Friday, January 8, 2016: 3:10 PM
Room M301 (Atlanta Marriott Marquis)
In the 1940s, United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and Guatemalan doctors intentionally infected sex workers, prisoners, soldiers, and psychiatric patients with syphilis and gonorrhea. Records indicate that the doctors did not cure the majority of their ‘patients’ or ask for their consent to conduct experiments. They contaminated over 1,000 people to test the effectiveness of penicillin and methods for the prevention of sexually-transmitted infections. After Historian Susan Reverby revealed the syphilis experiments to the public in 2010, the U.S. Bioethics Commission responded by holding individual USPHS doctors singularly responsible for pursuing this research despite acknowledging its dubious ethical design, while the Guatemalan government has distanced itself from the experiment, claiming that it constituted a violation of national sovereignty.
This paper argues that the experiments can best be understood by broadening the analytical frame beyond U.S. and Guatemalan foreign relations and ethical guidelines regulating biomedical research, and by closely investigating the bodily sovereignty of individual Guatemalans. Through analyzing contesting understandings of blood among medical doctors, ladino/a, and indigenous Guatemalans, this essay will examine how those subjected to experimentation experienced their bodily violation. U.S. and Guatemalan doctors conducted widespread blood tests throughout Guatemala, seeking to understand whether environment or race affected blood test results. These blood tests generated widespread resistance in the prison where the doctors were conducting experimentation.
This essay will use medical and public health reports, Guatemalan government records, newspapers, novels, and oral histories to show that the blood tests during the experiments are critical to revealing the eugenic medical understandings of both U.S. and Guatemalan doctors and Guatemalans’ alternative conceptualizations of their bodies, disease, and ethics. The presentation will also investigate ways that eugenics informed Guatemala’s revolution (1944-1954) and Juan José Arévalo’s commitment to bringing about a “spiritual socialism” in the Guatemalan people.
This paper argues that the experiments can best be understood by broadening the analytical frame beyond U.S. and Guatemalan foreign relations and ethical guidelines regulating biomedical research, and by closely investigating the bodily sovereignty of individual Guatemalans. Through analyzing contesting understandings of blood among medical doctors, ladino/a, and indigenous Guatemalans, this essay will examine how those subjected to experimentation experienced their bodily violation. U.S. and Guatemalan doctors conducted widespread blood tests throughout Guatemala, seeking to understand whether environment or race affected blood test results. These blood tests generated widespread resistance in the prison where the doctors were conducting experimentation.
This essay will use medical and public health reports, Guatemalan government records, newspapers, novels, and oral histories to show that the blood tests during the experiments are critical to revealing the eugenic medical understandings of both U.S. and Guatemalan doctors and Guatemalans’ alternative conceptualizations of their bodies, disease, and ethics. The presentation will also investigate ways that eugenics informed Guatemala’s revolution (1944-1954) and Juan José Arévalo’s commitment to bringing about a “spiritual socialism” in the Guatemalan people.