Cutler, together with
John Friend Mahoney, 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 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, supervised by Mahoney, then resumed these experiments, conducted by the United States Public Health Service with funding from the United States
National Institutes of Health (NIH), as part of the
syphilis experiments in Guatemala beginning in 1946, during which American and Guatemalan 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, as well as soldiers, prisoners and mental patients. In one especially "offensive" case from the Guatemala experiments, a mental patient named Bertha was first deliberately infected with syphilis and given penicillin only months later. Cutler, after observing that she "appeared she was going to die", inserted pus from a male gonorrhea victim into her eyes, urethra, and rectum. Four days later, infected in both eyes and bleeding from the urethra, she died. In another case, several epileptic women in Guatemala were injected with syphilis below the base of their skull. One was left paralyzed for two months by meningitis. Cutler said he was testing a theory that the injections could cure epilepsy. Cutler, who was acting chief, briefed the program to the
Federal Public Health Service during the yearly American Academy of Dermatology and Syphilology. Cutler became assistant
surgeon general in 1958. In the 1960s until November 1972, 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. 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. He died on February 8, 2003, at
Western Pennsylvania Hospital in
Pittsburgh. ==See also==