The Society of American Archivists held their 76^th Annual meeting on August 6-11, in San Diego,CA.
I attended this conference and was impressed with the wealth of information presented at the conference sessions. One of the most interesting sessions was a panel presentation that described the discovery of records of national and historic importance, titled “From Hidden Collection to International Incidents:  The John Cutler Papers and the Guatemala Syphilis Experiments.”

 

According to my notes from the presentation, Dr. John C. Cutler was a former employee of the U.S. Public Health Service 1942-1967, and was involved in research on Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, and mental health patients who were exposed to the syphilis bacteria.  From 1946-1948, the U.S. Public Health Service Venereal Disease Research Laboratory and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau collaborated with several government agencies in Guatemala on U.S. National Institutes of Health-funded studies involving deliberate exposure of human subjects with bacteria that cause sexually transmitted diseases (STD). The collection, which consists of approximately 12,000 pages of correspondence, reports, photographs, and patient records, was donated in September 1990 to the University of Pittsburgh by Dr. Cutler.  When Dr. Susan Reverby began researching the papers at the University of Pittsburgh, she uncovered the records of the 1946-1948 Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment. In September 2010, the University contacted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to request the transfer of the material to the Federal government.  After an examination of the material, it was determined that they were Federal records and were transferred to the National Archives at Atlanta in October, 2010.

The session examined the ethical issues surrounding this case study and the issues that archivists face daily with collections accessioning, processing, description, publication of online finding aids, collection digitization, and access to collections containing private and highly sensitive information.

Another study involving syphilis testing, which was conducted from 1929 to the 1970’s, began as a cooperative study involving the Public Health Service, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and state and local health departments in six southern states.  It evolved into an investigation of possible differences in the effects of the disease in Caucasian and African-Americans.  During the study, a number of Negroes in Tuskegee (Macon County), Alabama, were purposely left untreated, but were observed, studied, and compared to a control group that did not have the disease.  These types of studies, as well as the experiments of Nazi physicians, led to increased protection for subjects, including the creation of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) that is designated to approve, monitor, and review biomedical and behavioral research involving humans.

This session was particularly interesting to us at Cadence Group because of our records and information management work in the public health sector, which began in 1992.  During our work with the re-organization of physical records and electronic information with federal, commercial, and non-profit clients, we encounter materials from studies involving human subjects.  As we process records housed both within and outside of the federal government, Cadence Group works to identify information of historical value and public record.  Inactive federal agency records are transferred to the National Archives and regional federal records centers on a regular basis.  We have discovered and transferred materials from private sector collections to the National Archives, state archives, and local historical collections.

Contributed by: Rosa Dickens, Senior Information Management Specialist at The Cadence Group, Inc.

Ms. Dickens has both an MA in History and a Masters in Library and Information Science  from Clark Atlanta University, is a Certified Archivist, and is NARA Certified for Federal Records Management.  As a senior information management specialist at Cadence Group, she manages, consults, and assists on a variety of information management projects.

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