John Charles Cutler
| John Charles Cutler | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 29, 1915 Cleveland, Ohio |
| Died | February 8, 2003 (aged 87) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
| Education | Western Reserve University, M.D. (1941) |
| Employer | United States Public Health Service |
| Known for | unethical medical experiments regarding syphilitic patients |
| Spouse(s) | Eliese S. Cutler |
| Parent(s) | Grace Amanda Allen Glenn Allen Cutler |
John Charles Cutler (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. After his death, his involvement in several controversial and unethical medical studies of syphilis was revealed, including the Guatemala and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.
Cutler was born on June 29, 1915 in Cleveland, Ohio, to Grace Amanda Allen and Glenn Allen Cutler.
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 Terre Haute prison experiments and 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.
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.
...
Wikipedia