John Charles Cutler (June 29, 1915 – February 8, 2003) was a senior surgeon, and the acting chief of the
venereal disease
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs), also referred to as sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and the older term venereal diseases, are infections that are Transmission (medicine), spread by Human sexual activity, sexual activity, especi ...
program in the
United States Public Health Service
The United States Public Health Service (USPHS or PHS) is a collection of agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services concerned with public health, containing nine out of the department's twelve operating divisions. The Assistant ...
.
After his death, his involvement in several controversial and unethical medical studies of syphilis was revealed, including the Guatemala and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (informally referred to as the Tuskegee Experiment or Tuskegee Syphilis Study) was a study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Cente ...
s.
Early life and education
Cutler was born on June 29, 1915, in Cleveland
Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...
, Ohio, to Grace Amanda Allen and Glenn Allen Cutler.
He graduated from Western Reserve University
Western may refer to:
Places
*Western, Nebraska, a village in the US
*Western, New York, a town in the US
* Western Creek, Tasmania, a locality in Australia
*Western Junction, Tasmania, a locality in Australia
*Western world, countries that i ...
Medical School in 1941, and joined the Public Health Service
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichkei ...
in 1942. In 1943 he worked as a medical officer in the U.S. Public Health Venereal Disease Research Laboratory on Staten Island.
Bioethics violations
Cutler oversaw the Terre Haute prison experiments in 1943 and 1944, in which inmates at a federal penitentiary agreed to be injected with strains of gonorrhea
Gonorrhea, colloquially known as the clap, is a sexually transmitted infection (STI) caused by the bacterium ''Neisseria gonorrhoeae''. Infection may involve the genitals, mouth, or rectum. Infected men may experience pain or burning with u ...
in return for $100, a certificate of merit, and a letter of commendation to the parole board. The experiments were discontinued when Cutler's supervisor determined that the method of inducing gonorrhea in humans was unreliable and could not provide meaningful tests of prophylactic agents.
Cutler then resumed these experiments, conducted by the United States Public Health Service with funding from the United States National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...
(NIH), as part of the syphilis experiments in Guatemala beginning in 1946, during which doctors deliberately infected an estimated 1500 to 5000 Guatemalans with syphilis without the informed consent of the subjects. Unwitting subjects of the experiments included orphans as young as nine,[Rory Carroll]
Guatemala victims of US syphilis study still haunted by the “devil’s experiment”
''The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'', 8 June 2011. as well as soldiers, prisoners and mental patients.
Approximately half of those infected as part of the study were treated for the diseases they contracted. A total of 83 subjects died, though the exact relationship to the experiment remains undocumented. This study not only violated the Hippocratic Oath but it echoed Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
crimes exposed around the same time at the Nuremberg trials
The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany, for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, and other crimes, in World War II.
Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded m ...
.
In 1954, Cutler was in charge of experiments at Sing Sing
Sing Sing Correctional Facility, formerly Ossining Correctional Facility, is a maximum-security prison operated by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in the village of Ossining, New York. It is about north of ...
prison to determine whether a vaccine
A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease. The safety and effectiveness of vaccines has been widely studied and verified. made from the killed syphilis bacterium
Bacteria (; singular: bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one biological cell. They constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria were amon ...
would protect prisoners against infection when he later exposed them to the bacterium. Those infected were later treated with penicillin.[
Cutler became assistant surgeon general in 1958.
In the 1960s until November 1972, Cutler was involved in the ongoing ]Tuskegee syphilis experiment
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (informally referred to as the Tuskegee Experiment or Tuskegee Syphilis Study) was a study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Cente ...
, during which several hundred African-American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ensl ...
men who had contracted syphilis were observed, but left untreated.[
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.”
In 1967 Cutler was appointed Professor of International Health at the ]University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the univers ...
, 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. He died on February 8, 2003 at Western Pennsylvania Hospital
The Western Pennsylvania Hospital, commonly referred to as "West Penn Hospital", is located at 4800 Friendship Avenue in the Bloomfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The 317-bed hospital is part of the Allegheny Health Network. It ser ...
in Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...
. The university started a lecture series in his name after his death, but discontinued it in 2008 when his role in the Tuskegee experiment came to the attention of a new dean.[Torsten Ove:]
Presidential panel excoriates former Pitt dean
, ''Pittsburgh Post-Gazette'', 29 August 2011
See also
*List of medical ethics cases
Some cases have been remarkable for starting broad discussion and for setting precedent in medical ethics
Medical ethics is an applied branch of ethics which analyzes the practice of clinical medicine and related scientific research. Medical eth ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cutler, John Charles
1915 births
2003 deaths
University of Pittsburgh faculty
United States Public Health Service personnel
Physicians from Cleveland
Case Western Reserve University alumni
Human subject research in the United States
Medical ethics