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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1885: Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, microbiologist who laid the foundation for vaccines. After testing the rabies vaccine in 50 dogs, he tested the vaccine on 9-year-old Joseph Meister who was bitten by a rabid dog with a physician in attendance. The experiment was controversial and he was brought before the…
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…
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,…
1913–1951: Dr. Leo Stanley
Dr. Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at San Quentin Prison for forty years, performed a wide variety of unethical experiments — which were eugenics in nature — on hundreds of prisoners. He focused on rejuvenating their masculinity through two bizarre methods: sterilization, and by implanting them with “testicular substances” from executed…
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…
1930: Lubeck, Germany: Vaccine deaths
Lubeck, Germany: 240 infants were vaccinated with the Calmette tuberculosis vaccine during the first 10 days of life: almost all developed tuberculosis and 72 infants died from contaminated live BCG tuberculosis vaccine. Two people who had prepared the vaccine in the local laboratory went to prison for bodily injury due…