GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE AMERICA’S SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS “I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked.” — Dr. Hippocrates HDT WHAT? INDEX SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1900 Charleston’s population was estimated at 55,807. In the early years of the 20th Century physicians in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio would be conducting secret medical experiments, injecting dozens of orphans with syphilis-related materials and tuberculosis. “Here, you little bastards, instead of being a dead weight on society we’re going to give you a chance to be contributors!” “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1931 Under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads infected human subjects with cancer cells (well, but they were only Puerto Ricans). Later this researcher would establish US Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama, and would be named to the US Atomic Energy Commission. While associated with the US Atomic Energy Commission, he would initiate a series of nuclear radiation exposure experiments upon American soldiers and upon civilian hospital patients. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS He would write about it in the following manner: The Porto Ricans are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever to inhabit this sphere... I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off HDT WHAT? INDEX SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE eight and transplanting cancer into several more... All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects. (Later on he would distance himself from the attitude he had expressed, by explaining that at the time he had written that, he happened to have been infuriated by something that had just happened to him.) NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1932 In Tuskegee, Alabama, the United States Public Health Service embarked upon a long-term secret medical experiment to discover and evaluate possible effective treatments for syphilis. Some 600 late stage syphilitic African American men were identified and recruited for the study. Some 200 of the 600 would receive various treatments, while 399 would be misinformed and misled, and provided with no medical care whatever even when safe and effective medical treatments became available in the 1940s. The 399 would be used as human guinea pigs, to trace the course of the complications of this debilitating and fatal disease. (Also affected were 50 wives who had been infected by their husbands and 20 children who had received the disease congenitally.) Of course, this was being done for the good of all, so what’s your problem? Of course, these people had gone out and gotten themselves infected entirely on their own initiative, so what’s your problem? The sacrifice of the 400 black men would transform their useless lives into the lives of unknowing heroes, so what’s your problem? Because they were black, of course, no-one would ever be interested in what happened to them, and thus the PHS would be safe from all inquiry. They all would subsequently die from their untreated syphilis, with their families never informed that they could have been being treated. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1935 After millions had died from Pellagra over a span of two decades, the U.S. Public Health Service acted to stem the disease. The director of the agency acknowledged that it had known for at least that long that Pellagra was a mere niacin deficiency but, because most of the deaths had been occurring within poverty-stricken black populations, there had been no impulse to act officiously — no matter how many of these black Americans died, from the agency’s standpoint there would always be a plenty of them still alive. THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1939 In a “Monster Study” on children in the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport that would until 1988 be covered up, researchers attempted to pressure children to begin to be stutterers. Some who spoke fluently before the secret medical experiment would be given lifelong speech problems. The experiment was designed and supervised by Dr. Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa, himself a stutterer, who would become one of our most prominent speech pathologists, and was conducted by Mary Tudor, a graduate student under his supervision. Needing no permission from parents as there were no parents, Tudor subjected half the orphans to constant criticism to make them self-conscious about their speech, while denying them any positive therapy. She thus eventually drove most of them to become stutterers. She has been quoted as commenting that “the pitiful part” had been that she “got them to trust me, and then I did this horrible thing to them.” Afterward, the university made no great effort to reverse the impact of this wicked experiment, and salvage the children who had been induced to begin to stutter. When news of the Nazi experiments in Europe began to come in, some of Dr. Johnson’s graduate students noticed the similarity and warned him that in the aftermath of world war “observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could destroy his career.” “This was the kind of stuff you would think they were doing in Auschwitz, and this is why, at that time, people concealed it,” said Franklin Silverman, a student of Johnson’s who became a professor of speech pathology at Marquette University in Milwaukee. “They wanted to block it out of their minds and make believe it didn’t happen.” The experiment had become an embarrassment to Johnson, said Bill Trotter, a retired speech pathology professor at Marquette who also studied under Johnson. “I heard some of the orphans didn’t recover,” he said. This was not the only nefarious harm done at the orphanage. The researchers of the University of Iowa had also conducted another secret medical experiment, for instance, even before this stuttering study, a study in which they had demonstrated that they were able to lower the general intelligence of a child by deliberately removing stimulation from its environment. In its 1936 biennial report, the Iowa State Board of Control, the panel which oversaw such state institutions, had bragged about the manner in which it was facilitating the University of Iowa in conducting such experiments upon human subjects. The orphans were guinea pigs, period paragraph. I am terming this a “secret” medical experiment simply because Professor Johnson make a habit in his publications of never referring to it, and instead reinforcing his simplistic theory of stuttering by the use of other, more indirect evidence. His “diagnosogenic theory” was that stuttering was being perpetuated by the reactions of others to it, and so he was reporting, for instance, as indirect evidence, that certain tribes of native Americans were so relaxed about their children’s speech development that they produced no stutterers, and in fact in their native language did not even possess a word for stuttering. (Dr. Johnson’s information about these tribes, we now know, was utterly presumptive: not only did these tribes have a word for stuttering, but also, they did have stutterers.) On many occasions, of course, he could have mentioned the horrible experiment that he had supervised on the children in the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport, in which he had deliberately induced stuttering and deliberately ruined lives — but he most carefully made no mention of this. (In the profession, Dr. Johnson’s theories are now discounted, as his experiments have since the 1970s been regarded as having been tendentious, in that they were aimed only at confirming the value of his a priori HDT WHAT? INDEX SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE theorizing. Speech therapists are no longer endlessly reinforcing stuttering by providing stutterers with unqualified praise and endless reinforcement regardless of what sounds they produce.) At the age of 84, the former speech therapist Mary Tudor received a letter from one of the orphans she had experimented on, Mary Korlaske Nixon, who had been case number 15. Late in life, after traumatic events, she had relapsed into stuttering and had been again institutionalized. She wrote to Mary Tudor because she had been belatedly informed that as a child in the orphanage she had been experimented upon, not to do her good but to do her harm — to induce her, when she did not stutter, to begin stuttering. She had obtained and had read with great interest Mary Tudor’s unpublished university thesis. The letter called the former speech therapist “monster” and “Nazi”: I remember your face, how kind you were and you looked like my mother. But you were there to destroy my life. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.