1714: Charles Maitland, Smallpox

Dr. Armauer Hensen, a Norweigian microbiologist who discovered the bacterium that causes leprosy, having failed to grow the bacterium in a petri dish or any experimental animal, he tried to inoculate leprosy into the eye of a woman without her consent or knowledge. In 1880, she sued him in a…

“The eternal providence has appointed me to watch over the life and health of Thy creatures. May the love for my art actuate me at all time; may neither avarice nor miserliness, nor thirst for glory or for a great reputation engage my mind; for the enemies of truth and…

U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Virginia forced sterilization statute of people considered “genetically unfit.” Harvard-educated eugenicist, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ infamous declaration, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough. . .” resulted in the forced sterilization not only of Carrie Buck of Charlottesville, Virginia, who was falsely “diagnosed” as mentally deficient and…

American Medical Association rejects request from 5,000 black physicians to join the AMA. The rejection was widely reported in German medical jounals. (Lifton, Nazi Medicine: the anti-Hippocratic Legacy) Not until July 2008, did the American Medical Association issue a formal apology for discriminating against black physicians well into the 1960s….

Joseph Goldberger, MD, under orders of the US Public Health Office induces Pellagra, a debilitating fatal disease affecting the central nervous system, in twelve Mississippi inmates in an attempt to discover treatments for the disease. He determined that the disease was caused by niacin (Vitamin B3) deficiency. But the Public…

Jenner used children to test a theory — based on folklore, not scientific evidence — that cowpox, a disease common in the rural parts of western England in the late eighteenth century, conferred immunity against subsequent exposure to smallpox. He tested his theory primarily on healthy children. He injected eight-year-old…