An Ill-bred Culture of Experimentation: Malaria Therapy and Race in the United States Public Health Service Laboratory at the South Carolina State Hospital, 1932-1952

Abstract

Abstract While most are aware of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments in which African American syphilis patients went untreated, less is known about experiments with malaria fever therapy conducted upon syphilis patients during the same period by the Unites States Public Health Service at the Williams Laboratory on the grounds of the South Carolina State Hospital (SCSH) in Columbia, SC. Over a twenty-year period, physicians maintained patients as malaria reservoirs for patient-to-patient inoculation and subjected patients to extreme fevers and thousands upon thousands of insect bites as part of a program in which one disease was tested as therapy for another. Using extant administrative files, medical journals from the period, and a database created from SCSH annual reports, this paper considers the ethics of malaria fever therapy experiments while exposing the conditions under which patients suffered the intersecting oppressions of race, class, and mental illness. It illuminates the prevalent scientific racism of the period that enabled pseudo-medical assumptions about African Americans’ perceived penchant for poverty, deviant sex, and pain tolerance, which combined to enable a culture of experimentation that influenced events at Stateville Penitentiary and continued long after penicillin became widely available.