John Charles Cutler: June 29, 1915 – February 8, 2003

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Adapted from Wikipedia.[1]

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John Charles Cutler, M.D. (June 29, 1915 – February 8, 2003) was a senior surgeon, and the acting chief of the venereal disease program in the United States Public Health Service.[2]


Following his death in 2003, his involvement in several controversial and unethical medical experiments regarding syphilis was revealed, including the Guatemala and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.


Analysis of his experiments contain references to homosexuals. One says: "It appears that attempts were made to exclude subjects with known homosexual behavior due to concerns about potential sexual contact inside the hospital." It adds that that the records are unclear about the reasons for patients receiving or not receiving penicillin:

Some subjects received penicillin for . . . reasons, including “political reasons”, “security reasons before departure”, “for reasons of fear of not having been completely treated”, or “because of pronounced homosexual tendencies”.[3]


Cutler was born on June 29, 1915 in Cleveland, Ohio, to Grace Amanda Allen and Glenn Allen Cutler.[4]


He graduated from Western Reserve University Medical School in 1941, and joined the Public Health Service in 1942. In 1943 he worked as a medical officer in the U.S. Public Health Venereal Disease Research Laboratory on Staten Island.


Cutler oversaw the syphilis experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s, during which doctors deliberately infected an estimated 1500 Guatemalans, including orphans as young as nine, soldiers, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis without the informed consent of the subjects. This study not only violated the hippocratic oath but it echoed Nazi crimes exposed around the same time at the Nuremberg trials.[5]


In 1954, Cutler was in charge of experiments at Sing Sing prison to see if a vaccine made from the killed syphilis bacterium, would protect prisoners against infection when he later exposed them to the bacterium. Those infected were later treated with penicillin.[6]


Cutler became assistant surgeon general in 1958.


In the 1960s, Cutler was involved in the ongoing Tuskegee syphilis experiment, during which several hundred African-American men who had contracted syphilis were observed, but left untreated.[7]


In “The Deadly Deception”, the 1993 Nova documentary about the Tuskegee experiments, Cutler states, “It was important that they were supposedly untreated, and it would be undesirable to go ahead and use large amounts of penicillin to treat the disease, because you’d interfere with the study.”[8]


In 1967 Cutler was appointed professor of international health at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also served as chairman of the department of health administration and acting dean of the Graduate School of Public Health in 1968–1969.[1] He died on February 8, 2003 at Western Pennsylvania Hospital in Pittsburgh.[1] The university started a lecture series in his name after his death, but discontinued it in 2008 when his role in the Tuskegee experiment emerged.[9]


References

  1. ↑ <Accessed August 31, 2011.
  2. ↑ "John Charles Cutler. Pioneer in preventing sexual diseases". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. February 12, 2003. Retrieved October 2, 2010. "Dr. Cutler, a former assistant surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service, was part of a group that in 1944 worked out the ways penicillin could be used to treat syphilis." "Sing Sing Tests Held Raising Hopes for Finding Preventive". New York Times. December 9, 1954. Retrieved October 2, 2010. "For several years penicillin has been used to cure syphilis. Dr. John C. Cutler, acting chief of the venereal-disease program of the Federal Public Health Service ..."
  3. ↑ U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Report on Findings from the U.S. Public Health Service Sexually Transmitted Disease Inoculation Study of 1946–1948, Based on Review of Archived Papers of John Cutler, MD, at the University of Pittsburgh. Executive Summary
  4. ↑ "John Charles Cutler (1915–2003) in the Hubbard Family Tree". Ancestry.com
  5. ↑ Rory Carroll. "Guatemala victims of US syphilis study still haunted by the “devil’s experiment”, The Guardian, 8 June 2011. Chris McGreal, (October 1, 2010). "US says sorry for “outrageous and abhorrent” Guatemalan syphilis tests". The Guardian. "Conducted between 1946 and 1948, the experiments were led by John Cutler, a US health service physician who would later be part of the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study in Alabama in the 1960s." "Wellesley professor unearths a horror: Syphilis experiments in Guatemala". Boston Globe. October 1, 2010. Retrieved October 2, 2010. "That is when she came across files belonging to a deceased researcher named John C. Cutler, who had been involved in the later years of the Tuskegee project. “I expected to find something on Tuskegee,” Reverby recalled. “There was nothing. What he left behind were these records from the Guatemala study.”"
  6. ↑ "Sing Sing Tests Held Raising Hopes for Finding Preventive". New York Times. December 9, 1954. Retrieved October 2, 2010. "For several years penicillin has been used to cure syphilis. Dr. John C. Cutler, acting chief of the venereal-disease program of the Federal Public Health Service ..." "Syphilis Preventive Seen by Scientists". |"For several years doctors have been curing syphilis with penicillin. Dr. John Cutler, senior surgeon and acting chief of the venereal disease of the US … Associated Press. December 8, 1954.
  7. ↑ McGreal, Chris (October 1, 2010). "US says sorry for “outrageous and abhorrent” Guatemalan syphilis tests". The Guardian. Retrieved October 2, 2010. "Conducted between 1946 and 1948, the experiments were led by John Cutler, a US health service physician who would later be part of the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study in Alabama in the 1960s." "Wellesley professor unearths a horror: Syphilis experiments in Guatemala". Boston Globe. October 1, 2010. Retrieved October 2, 2010. "That is when she came across files belonging to a deceased researcher named John C. Cutler, who had been involved in the later years of the Tuskegee project. “I expected to find something on Tuskegee,” Reverby recalled. “There was nothing. What he left behind were these records from the Guatemala study.”"
  8. ↑ "The Deadly Deception". George Strait, ABC News Medical Correspondent, host. Nova. PBS. 01/26/1993. "The Dark History of Medical Experimentation from the Nazis to Tuskegee to Puerto Rico". Amy Goodman, host; Susan Reverby, guest. Democracy Now!. Pacifica Radio. 2010/10/05.
  9. ↑ "John Charles Cutler. Pioneer in preventing sexual diseases". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. February 12, 2003. Retrieved October 2, 2010. "Dr. Cutler, a former assistant surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service, was part of a group that in 1944 worked out the ways penicillin could be used to treat syphilis." Torsten Ove: Presidential panel excoriates former Pitt dean, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 29 August 2011.
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