Capital cities in Latin America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the “modern model” for public space as representative of public consciousness. This “modern model” based on Paris, a European city that achieved civilization in the broadest sense. In some cities in Latin America, such as Buenos Aires, this meant the implementation and emphasis of Parisian style architecture, monumental buildings, parks and promenade that created public consciousness of high culture and science, otherwise known as civilization. A similar choice of modern model, is apparent in Guatemala to create public consciousness. Guatemala City, at least for public health physicians and other members of the Guatemalan elite, in the twentieth
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This procedure, by public health doctors was seen as a failure this procedure failed to answer the question of penicillin as prophylaxis. Thus, to continue to answer this question doctors moved onto the second procedure and with permission from the Mental Institution turned the experiment to Guatemala’s Insane Asylum. Here they would infect psychiatric patients with syphilis through their eyes and through cisternal puncture where doctors would inject syphilis into the spinal fluid of the human subject from the back of the skull. This procedure was used to determine the effectiveness of the “blood-spinal-fluid” barrier. This procedure would lead to two women to develop headaches, another lost the use of her legs for a period of time and one would eventually die. As the human rights began to be blurred by laws that did not protect psychiatric patients in Guatemala, the more violent the procedures would become. These two procedures were done on over 1500 human subjects where the bodies of working class and poor lives were disregarded as humans and led to 83 deaths and unidentifiable or uncontrolled number of syphilis infected Guatemalan bodies. By then the Guatemalan Public Health Services, controlled by the Ladinos elite, justified and accomplished its goal in regulating the indigenous and working class migrants, in Guatemala City by either moralizing them through health policies that required their homes to to match sanitation codes or in the most extreme ways by keeping them contained behind closed doors in biomedical
This procedure, by public health doctors was seen as a failure this procedure failed to answer the question of penicillin as prophylaxis. Thus, to continue to answer this question doctors moved onto the second procedure and with permission from the Mental Institution turned the experiment to Guatemala’s Insane Asylum. Here they would infect psychiatric patients with syphilis through their eyes and through cisternal puncture where doctors would inject syphilis into the spinal fluid of the human subject from the back of the skull. This procedure was used to determine the effectiveness of the “blood-spinal-fluid” barrier. This procedure would lead to two women to develop headaches, another lost the use of her legs for a period of time and one would eventually die. As the human rights began to be blurred by laws that did not protect psychiatric patients in Guatemala, the more violent the procedures would become. These two procedures were done on over 1500 human subjects where the bodies of working class and poor lives were disregarded as humans and led to 83 deaths and unidentifiable or uncontrolled number of syphilis infected Guatemalan bodies. By then the Guatemalan Public Health Services, controlled by the Ladinos elite, justified and accomplished its goal in regulating the indigenous and working class migrants, in Guatemala City by either moralizing them through health policies that required their homes to to match sanitation codes or in the most extreme ways by keeping them contained behind closed doors in biomedical