1714: Charles Maitland, Smallpox

Yellow fever epidemics struck the United States repeatedly in the 18th and 19th centuries. The disease was not indigenous; epidemics were imported by ship from the Caribbean. Dr. Reed decided against self-experimentation and injected 22 Spanish immigrant workers in Cuba instead with the agent for yellow fever. He paid them…

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,…

Arthur Wentworth, MD, a pediatrician trained at Harvard Medical School, performed spinal taps on 29 babies and young children at Children’s Hospital, Boston, to determine if the procedure was harmful. Dr. John Roberts of Philadelphia, noting the non-therapeutic indication, labeled Wentworth’s procedures “human vivisection.” (Grodin and Glantz, Children As Research…

In Pennsylvania, 146 children were inoculated with syphilis in several hospitals (Sierra, 2011); and in Philadelphia’s St. Vincent’s House researchers “tested” 15 infants at with tuberculin resulting in several children becoming permanently blind. This atrocity was recorded by the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

Probably few Bible scholars or scientists are aware that Daniel—the same Daniel who was cast into the lion’s den—was also a scientist. Daniel proposed (what is now recognized as) a classic experimental design: comparing the effect of a vegetable and water diet to a diet of the king’s meat and…

Under the undue influence of Harvard and other Ivy League eugenicists, the U.S. enacted the Immigration Restriction Act, 1924 to prevent “social inadequates” from immigrating. The established quotas according to racial and/or ethnic ancestry; and was the main tool used to prevent Jewish survivors of the Holocaust from gaining entry…