By Hannah Keepers

In her campus lecture, Professor Susan Reverby talked about her research findings in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service in which prisoners, referred to a zero rights bearing rights citizens, and other poor, primarily African Americans were made to believe they were receiving experimental treatment for syphilis but in fact were not, they were unknowingly participants in a study of the natural progression of untreated syphilis.

While doing research on this, already ethically questionable medical study, Reverby came across information about an even more alarming study that had taken place over several decades in Guatemala.

In Guatemala, prisoners, soldiers, and inmates in mental asylums were infected, the inmates were sometimes allowed access to sex workers who were infected with the disease, sometimes they were infected by inoculation, the researchers would scar up the men’s penis’s and pour the germs onto skin abrasions they had created. They were given things like cigarettes and allowed to watch movies for distraction while this happened.

The power differential between the Guatemalan government that allowed this to happen and the United States government that actually did it, not to mention the institutional racism and the declaration of the inmates and prisoners as second class citizens without rights, is often cited as what made this an acceptable practice.

Reverby also discussed the use of apology, a great performative apology, as a way to white wash over the incredible violations of the study. She said that while the first step to change is certainly acknowledgement, an apology is not a solution, it is not an action. There was a great failure on the part of our government to address the power structures that allowed this to happen. She went on to say that restorative justice depends on restorative history. That we cannot look upon this incident and simply decide this bad judgement by bad doctors in a different time and time and place and it could not possibly happen again. We must address what allowed it to happen in the first place, the structures that created the space for this kind of treatment to be inflicted on any human beings must be dismantled.