Black slaves, and blacks in general were not given rights as to give consent to procedures and experiments performed on them, making them the perfect candidates for brutal medical experimentations. People of the time also believed that blacks did not feel pain like whites did, separating the races even more, and the whites also believed that the blacks sexually hyperactive/ This made the Blacks appear to whites as “highly prone” to sexually transmitted diseases, such as syphilis (Washington, 2006). These things were not true, but it gave reason to the whites to use these easy targetable Black people as test subjects because they were not of the same legal status as they were. Therefore, the syphilis experiments took place on the blacks. …show more content…
In Guatemala, black, male subjects were purposefully injected with syphilis, be it from already infected prostitutes, or directly through an injections of tissue from infected human or animal gummas and chancres (Reverby, 2011). Guatemala legalized prostitution specifically for this experiment, and allowed prostitutes infected with syphilis to offer their services to prison inmates that could be potential candidates for the experiment with taxpayer dollars (Reverby, 2011). Non-infected prostitutes were given had the disease placed on their cervixes before they were invited to the prison (Reverby, 2011). The prostitutes would then be sent back to the labs to see if they were successfully infected (Reverby, 2011). The point of the experiments and research in Guatemala was to explore whether various chemicals could be used to prevent syphilis after sexual exposure to the disease (Reverby, 2011). Penicillin was most typically used for the cure of syphilis (Reverby, 2011). Cutler and Funes, the spearhead physicians of this experiment, had two goals (Reverby, 2011). One was to use syphilization to test the human response to “fresh infective material to enhance body response to disease… (to understand) superinfection and reinfection (Reverby, 2011).” The next goal was to find ways to prevent the disease after immediate exposure (Reverby, 2011). This disease was very brutal and invasive. Many people were purposefully infected with syphilis whether they wanted to be or not. This was the case in many of the historical medical experimentations. People were not considered as human beings because of their race, therefore they were not given the basic right to have the ability to give consent and permission to what happens to them. The Jewish were under similar parameters as the blacks were. They were legally inferior, and not thought of as human