“ETHICALLY IMPOSSIBLE” STD Research in Guatemala from 1946-1948 
SUBJECT PROFILE: BERTA 
Berta was a female patient in the 
Psychiatric Hospital. Her age and 
the illness that brought her to the 
hospital are unknown. 
illness died four days after the researchers 
inoculated her, without receiving any treat- 
ment for the gonorrhea or syphilis with 
which the researchers had infected her. 416 
Syphilis Experiments 
In February 1948, Berta was 
injected in her left arm with 
syphilis. A month later, she 
developed scabies (an itchy skin 
infection caused by a mite). Several 
weeks later, Dr. Cutler noted that 
she had also developed red bumps 
where he had injected her arm, 
lesions on her arms and legs, and 
her skin was beginning to waste 
away from her body. Berta was 
not treated for syphilis until three 
months after her injection. 
Soon after, on August 23, Dr. 
Cutler wrote that Berta appeared 
as if she was going to die, but he 
did not specify why. That same 
day he put gonorrheal pus from 
another male subject into both 
of Berta’s eyes, as well as in 
her urethra and rectum. He also 
re-infected her with syphilis. 
Several days later, Berta’s 
eyes were filled with pus from 
the gonorrhea, and she was 
bleeding from her urethra. 
On August 27, Berta died. 
Overview 
The researchers conducted intentional expo- 
sure experiments involving syphilis, the 
STD caused by the bacterium Treponema 
pallidum , with 688 subjects, including 
commercial sex workers, prisoners, and 
psychiatric patients from May 1947 through 
October 1948. 417 The primary purpose of 
these experiments was to study the clin- 
ical effectiveness of the orvus-mapharsen 
prophylaxis that Drs. Arnold and Mahoney 
proved effective in rabbits. 418 Other types of 
prophylaxis tested were the Army “pro kit” 
(a topical preparation containing calomel, 
sulfathiazole, white petrolatum, light 
mineral oil, and cetyl alcohol), parenterally 
administered preparations (e.g., POB), and 
oral penicillin in pill or liquid form. 419 
The researchers used several different strains 
of infectious material for the syphilis experi- 
ments. 420 They used rabbits as the source of 
most of the strains, 421 but they also tested 
strains taken directly from humans (“human 
passage material”) because of questions about 
the impact of rabbit passage on the pathogenicity of Treponema pallidum and 
conviction that “the ultimate value of a prophylactic agent depended upon the 
ability to protect man against the infection in man.” 422 These methods exposed 
subjects to additional health risks for human- to-human pathogens in addition to 
the syphilis and any number of zoonotic pathogens from the rabbit strains. 
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