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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…

Biomedical research in Germany was considered the most advanced in the world — both in its development and its ethics standards. Berlin Code of Ethics (1900) guaranteed that “all medical interventions for other than diagnostic, healing, and immunization purposes, regardless of other legal or moral authorization are excluded under all…

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…

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…

Luther Emmett Holt, a professor of children’s disease at Columbia University, was accused of conducting 1,000 tuberculin tests on sick and dying babies at NY Babies’ Hospital. (Grodin and Glantz, Children As Research Subjects)

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…

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.

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…

In a lawsuit involving the Society of NY Hospital, Justice Benjamin Cardozo ruled : “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body, and a surgeon who performs an operation without his patient’s consent commits an assault.” But…

“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…

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…