“This won’t help a bit…”
The U.S. has “oh, gee, sorry!“-d for its 1940s program of infecting Guatamalans with syphilis and gonorrhea. The poor folks were tainted without their consent or even knowledge and, its claimed, were goaded into passing the diseases on. In a truly damning paper(pdf) Susan Reverby exposes the American physician’s gruesome practices…
Without the vaguest desire to seem monomaniacal this affirms one o’ this weblog’s themes: the truth of conspiracies. [...]On the women inmates…the inoculum was inserted after needles were used to abrade the women’s forearms, face or mouth. With the men, the inoculation was often much more direct…A doctor held the subject’s penis, pulled back the foreskin, abraded the penis slightly just short of drawing blood by scraping the skin with a hypodermic needle, introduced a cotton pledget (or small dressing) and dripped drops of the syphilitic emulsion onto the pad and through it to the roughed skin on the man’s penis for at least an hour, sometimes two.
In other studies of prophylaxis at an army barracks, the men were allowed to have sex with uninfected prostitutes, then had the syphilitic inoculum put into the meatus of their penis, told to urinate an hour later and apply differing kinds of chemical prophylaxis.42 In still other studies, the inoculum was placed on the cervix of prostitutes before they were allowed to have sex with the prisoners.
Continues here.
