Arts and Literature
The earliest Europe work of art to depict syphilis is Albrecht Dürer's Syphilitic Man, a wood cutting believed to represent a Landsknecht, a Northern European mercenary. The myth of the femme fatale or "poison women" of the 19th century is believed to be partly derived from the devastation of syphilis, with classic examples in literature including John Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci.
The artist Jan van der Straet painted a scene of a wealthy man receiving treatment for syphilis with the tropical wood guaiacum sometime around 1580. The title of the work is "Preparation and Use of Guayaco for Treating Syphilis". That the artist chose to include this image in a series of works celebrating the New World indicates how important a treatment, however ineffective, for syphilis was to the European elite at that time. The richly colored and detailed work depicts four servants preparing the concoction while a physician looks on, hiding something behind his back while the hapless patient drinks.
Tuskegee and Guatemala studies
One of the most infamous United States cases of questionable medical ethics in the 20th century was the Tuskegee syphilis study. The study took place in Tuskegee, Alabama, and was supported by the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) in partnership with the Tuskegee Institute. The study began in 1932, when syphilis was a widespread problem and there was no safe and effective treatment. The study was designed to measure the progression of untreated syphilis. By 1947, penicillin had been validated as an effective cure for syphilis and was becoming widely used to treat the disease. Study directors, however, continued the study and did not offer the participants treatment with penicillin. This is debated, and some have found that penicillin was given to many of the subjects. The study did not end until 1972.
Syphilis experiments were also carried out in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. They were United States-sponsored human experiments, conducted during the government of Juan José Arévalo with the cooperation of some Guatemalan health ministries and officials. Doctors infected soldiers, prisoners, and mental patients with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, without the informed consent of the subjects, and then treated them with antibiotics. In October 2010, the U.S. formally apologized to Guatemala for conducting these experiments.