1714: Charles Maitland, Smallpox
Dr. Maitland inoculated six prisoners with smallpox, promising them release from prison. (Read D. Wooton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates, 2006.)
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1906: Richard Strong, MD, cholera
Richard Strong, MD, a professor of tropical medicine at Harvard, conducted cholera experiments on 24 prisoners in the Philippines killing thirteen. Their deaths were attributed to the accidental substitution of bubonic plague serum for cholera. He rewarded the survivors with cigars. During the Nazi trials at Nuremberg, the defendants cited…
1911: Hideyo Noguchi, MD, syphilis
Hideyo Noguchi, MD, of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research injected a syphilis preparation into 146 children — 100 were institutionalized and 46 were healthy — in an attempt to develop a skin test for syphilis. Several parents sued Dr. Noguchi for infecting their children with syphilis. (Noguchi. Journal of…
30 BC: Cleopatra: Gender Experiment
In the first century B.C. Cleopatra devised an experiment to test the accuracy of the theory that it takes 40 days to fashion a male fetus fully and 80 days to fashion a female fetus. When her handmaids were sentenced to death under government order, Cleopatra had them impregnated and…
1931: Germany: “Guidelines for Human Experimentation”
Germany’s Ministry of the Interior issued “Guidelines for Human Experimentation” Unambiguous informed consent is mandatory; particular care must be taken when the subject is a child under 18; exploitation of patients who poor, or socially disadvantaged is prohibited; disclosure requirements — the purpose, justification, and the manner in which research…
1904: Carnegie Institution — Experimental Evolution –> Eugenics
The Carnegie Institution established the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, under the directorship of Charles Davenport, which became the foundation for the eugenics movement. Eugenics uses pseudo-scientific techniques and hypotheses to support racism. “Historians of race and American medicine have documented over two centuries of race-based scientific…
1897: Giuseppe Sanarelli, MD
Giuseppe Sanarelli, MD, Italian bacteriologist injects the bacillus causing yellow fever five patients without their consent. Three of the five patients died. Dr. William Osler publicly admonished Sanarelli, stating: “To deliberately inject a poison of known high degree of virulency into a human being, unless you obtain the man’s sanction,…