The United States considers itself a free country, but some people seem to be more free than others, including the freedom to decide the health and lives of others. Without knowledge or consent, various live tests are conducted on others, even involving radioactive sources, pathogens and other deadly experimental objects, such unethical living tests have run through the history of medicine in the United States for the past two centuries. Public cases have long been repeatedly reported in the press, and many experiments have been deliberately covered up and unknown. Looking back at this history, one can understand why the United States after World War II took in Japanese Unit 731, which committed heinous crimes. Because the live experiments done by Japan's Unit 731 at that time were only common in the United States.
Tuskegee is a small, impoverished town in the heart of Alabama. Like other cities in the Southern United States where African-Americans make up the vast majority, Tuskegee is experiencing an extremely rapid population drain. Those Africans who have traveled to other places in search of a way to survive take away not only the infinite memories of the farmland in their hometowns, but also a sensational old story. In 1932, the Federal Government's Public Health Service, in conjunction with Tuskegee University, a local African-American university, conducted a series of human trials related to syphilis against 600 Tuskegee African-American men. Of the 600 people, 399 were diagnosed with syphilis before participating in the experiment. The Public Health Department promised to provide free medical treatment, medical examinations and meals to those involved in the experiment, but did not provide real treatment for syphilis patients. The real purpose of the Public Health Agency is to observe and record the onset of syphilis patients without any meaningful treatment. Many of the 399 patients with syphilis did not even know that they were suffering from the fatal venereal disease at that time, but were prevaricating by the Public Health Bureau with vague terms such as "bad blood" for treatment. In fact, as early as the 1940s, penicillin had been discovered by the medical community to be an effective treatment for syphilis, but the public health department was indifferent and watched as Tuskegee's patients died tragically one by one. Surprisingly and inexplicably, this human experiment actually lasted for 40 years, until 1972, when the New York Times poked out the inside story and the experiment was hastily concluded.
△ Tuskegee is a small city located in the south of the United States, and the residents are mostly African-American. Image source: The Wall Street Journal
△ Tuskegee experiment, the staff to the experimental subjects to draw blood. Image credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
During the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, Carl Polet and other doctors in Nazi Germany, who participated in live human experiments, argued that such human experiments were nothing more than ordinary before the war, because many people were also doing them. In order to save some face, in 1947, the American medical and legal circles led the drafting of the Nuremberg Code, which served as the moral basis for the Nuremberg trials, which found that human experimentation without the consent of the subjects was illegal. But it is clear that judging by what the public health authorities have done, they have not seriously adhered to the Nuremberg Code of Conduct formulated by their own families.
The Nuremberg Tribunal, established after World War II, tried the case of the United States against Karl Polet and others, a Nazi doctor who conducted human experiments. Image credit: Florida Supreme Court
The Tuskegee syphilis experiment is not the first case of live-body trials in the United States, and certainly not the last.
Racism has been the mainstream idea in American society for a long time, and in the eyes of white doctors, people of color are just subhuman creatures that look similar to "humans" (white people), and there is not much guilt in using them for medical experiments. As early as the end of the 19th century, the yellow-dominated Philippine colony was considered by American medical workers to be a paradise for human experimentation. U.S. Army medics have infected local prisoners with plague. Professors at Harvard University also ran over and secretly injected 24 prisoners with serum with cholera bacteria, some of which was mixed with plague bacteria, killing 13 people.
Richard Strong, a professor of tropical medicine at Harvard University, was the director of the Philippine Biology Laboratory in 1906 when Strong injected 24 prisoners with serum containing cholera bacteria, which were also contaminated with plague bacillus, eventually killing 13 people. Image credit: U.S. Army Medical Department
America, america's "backyard," is also used by the United States as an excellent place to conduct human experiments. Guatemala's political turmoil of 1944. The "banana republic," which is controlled by the United Fruit Company of the United States, has just driven out the extreme pro-American dictator Uviko through a general strike. However, the changes in the political situation have not fundamentally affected the interest network of the United States that has been laid out locally for many years. As a follow-up to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the U.S. Public Health Administration infected 1,308 unsuspecting Guatemalan residents with syphilis through a variety of means. Although Tuskegee's experiment was "fruitful", it was carried out in the United States after all, and once exposed, the experiment's performers may have a lot of lawsuits, and doctors did not have so many scruples because of the experiment against guatemalan people of color. Just like the Tuskegee experiment, the American "experts" carefully recorded the whole process of the experimental patients from being infected to the onset of illness and even death, but in the Guatemalan experiment, the "experts" were more autonomous, and they did not have to screen which people had syphilis in advance, but took the initiative to let the subjects be infected with syphilis first. Many people get a needle in the arm without knowing it, and they become guinea pigs for syphilis experiments. In this human trial, conducted between 1944 and 1948, a total of 83 people died.
△ Four patients in Guatemalan psychiatric hospitals, after the researchers infected them with syphilis, were treated with penicillin to determine the efficacy. Image credit: September 2011 report of the U.S. President's Committee on Bioethics Research
△ A Guatemalan female psychopath who was artificially infected with syphilis had a typical chancre of syphilis. The patient eventually died in the experiment. Image credit: September 2011 report of the U.S. President's Committee on Bioethics Research
△ Researchers use a variety of means to infect experimental subjects. Includes cerebellar bulbar puncture shown in the figure. According to Cutler, director of the Guatemalan Syphilis Research Project, this was done to study the effectiveness of the human blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier. Image credit: September 2011 report of the U.S. President's Committee on Bioethics Research
Another trend of thought that prevailed in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, along with racism, was social Darwinism. The disabled, prisoners, orphans, the mentally ill, etc. are all regarded as social discards and can be disposed of at will. As early as the 1880s, doctors injected syphilis into six girls with leprosy in Hawaii, all under the age of 12. In 1895, Henry Hayman, a pediatrician in New York, infected two mentally disabled boys with gonorrhea, the younger of whom was under the age of 6. In 1908, doctors in Philadelphia also dropped purified protein from Tuberculosis bacillus into the eyes of children in local orphanages, causing a large number of subjects to permanent blindness in both eyes.
△ Before and after World War II, neutroviral diseases in the US military prevailed, which seriously affected the combat effectiveness of the army. The U.S. military made many propaganda posters to inform soldiers of the dangers of "buying spring.". Image source: Business Insider
The Human experiments on syphilis in the United States, especially the U.S. military, are "deeply in love", mainly due to the misconduct of American soldiers, resulting in the widespread prevalence of venereal diseases in the military. If the original intention of the above-mentioned human experiments is to solve the medical problems that plague human beings by sacrificing some "low-level" individuals, then the next living experiment to be introduced is purely for the purpose of hurting and killing people. Even the victims of the experiment have nothing to do with race, occupation, social status, mental state, etc., and have truly achieved "equality before the living test". (Contributed by Jing Zhao)
(Edited by Zhang Wenjun)