After the Media Frenzy, Preventing Another ‘Guatemala’

October 19, 2010

I might easily have missed it. I was being a compulsive historian, going to one more archive (having already been to many) to find more material for what would become the book Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy (2009). I was in the University of Pittsburgh’s archives to read through some of the papers of Thomas Parran, the American Surgeon General (1936 – 1948) famed for his fight against syphilis and his book, Shadow on the Land. I realized that John C. Cutler, one of the key physicians in the study in Tuskegee who continued to defend it into the 1990s on the Nova film “Deadly Deception,” also taught at the University of Pittsburgh. He left papers there as well. (Bioethics Forum)