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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1932: U.S. Public Health, Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
U.S. Public Health Service begins a 25-year Syphilis experiment at Tuskegee, Alabama, involving 400 black sharecroppers. The purpose of the experiment was to study the natural course of untreated syphilis in Negro men. Notwithstanding the participation of black institutions, doctors and the pivotal nurse Eunice Rivers, the underlying premise of…
1916: American Medical Association, no research ethics code
“Leaders of the American Medical Association briefly considered amending the organization’s code of ethics to include the provision that human experimentation calling for the knowledgeable permission of the subject. The AMA leadership decided not to adopt such a stance believing it both unnecessary in light of the good moral character…
American Eugenics Research — Racism masquerading as “science”
“Whatever the motives and methods used to realise them – persuasion, education, coercion, sterilisation, segregation, euthanasia and more – eugenics has stemmed from the belief that a population, ‘race’, or even the species, is ‘degenerating’ and in urgent need of improvement and revitalisation.” (Prof. John Galloway. Review, The Oxford Handbook…
1938: American Medical Association rejects black physicians
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….
1921: Alfred Hess & Mildred Fish, orphan guinea pigs
Alfred Hess & Mildred Fish used orphans as guinea pigs in studies testing dietary factors in rickets and scurvy by withholding essential nutrients from institutionalized infants until they developed the disease. Orange juice was withheld until the infants developed hemorrhages associated with Scurvy. Konrad Bercovici, a social worker, strongly criticized…
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…