The Guatemala Syphilis Study is one of the darkest chapters in medical history: a U.S., funded experiment in the 1940s where doctors deliberately infected prisoners, soldiers, psychiatric patients, and sex workers in Guatemala with syphilis and other STIs without their informed consent. Many were never properly treated, never told what had been done to them, and were used as test subjects simply because they were poor, vulnerable, and out of sight.

Decades later, the study stands as a brutal reminder that “public health” and “scientific progress” have, far too often, been built on the bodies and lives of people who were never given a choice.