GUATEMALA EXPERIMENTS 1946-1948 
II 
mentioned above seems to be the one acceptable to all concerned 
and is one which offers the least risk of any trouble.” 436 
Notwithstanding these plans, Dr. Cutler’s records reflect that only 13 of the 
23 experiments involved sexual intercourse — the rest involved injection as 
an artificial exposure technique. 437 Writing in 1953 about the goals of the 
Penitentiary inoculation work, Dr. Cutler explained the purpose as seeking 
to identify an effective serologic test and answer several additional ques- 
tions (only one of which concerned prophylaxis, and none of which involved 
orvus-mapharsen): 
• What types of clinical and serologic changes might result from the injection 
of rabbit testicular syphilomata (versus human); 438 
■ Whether superinfection was possible; 439 
• Whether virulence of the disease could be lost due to length of infection in 
the rabbit donor; 440 
• Whether animal passage material “so attenuated or altered the bacterium that 
it [] lost the ability to penetrate the human mucus membrane,” leading the 
researchers to design an experiment to “pass the material through man”; 441 
• What was the effectiveness of “abortive penicillin therapy” 442 and intramuscular 
penicillin prophylaxis; 443 and 
• Whether treated subjects with early or late latent syphilis could be reinfected. 444 
The individual reports of the injection experiments, later found in the final 1955 
report, include research data collected for addressing each of these questions. 
Despite ongoing concern about serological testing and its reliability as an indi- 
cator of infection, the researchers began syphilis experiments with commercial 
sex workers and prisoners in May 1947 shortly after Drs. Mahoney, Heller 
and Van Slyke visited. 445 Writing in 1955, Dr. Cutler described the commer- 
cial sex workers who served the penitentiary populations as the “lowest in the 
social scale of local prostitutes and most frequently infected with syphilis and 
gonorrhea,” 446 but Dr. Cutler inoculated some of the commercial sex workers 
directly through intra-cervical injection of rabbit testicular syphilomata. 447 
Shortly thereafter, these women had sexual contact with 12 inmates. None of 
the prisoners developed clinical symptoms of infection, but complete serologic 
follow-up was impossible due to the prisoners’ objections to the collection 
of blood. 448 As in the first two gonorrhea experiments, this first syphilis 
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