| LIST 76 | 23 Early Cases of Involuntary Human Experimentation |
Most people who don't have their heads in the sand realize that the US government, military, and intelligence agencies have been medically experimenting on citizens since World War II. And it's no secret that the Nazis and Imperial Japanese performed hideous human experimentation during the 1930s and 1940s. Except for the notable case of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment (1932-1972)—in which poor black men in Alabama went untreated for the venereal disease so doctors could observe the effects—human experimentation before the WWII era is still shrouded in obscurity. Digging through mountains of primary documents, professor Susan E. Lederer uncovered this hidden history and presented it in the Johns Hopkins University book Subjected to Science, which focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on the United States.
1
Lederer writes: “Before the civil war some southern physicians had actually used slaves as experimental subjects, advertising from time to time their wish to purchase Negroes with particular complaints in order to test new remedies.”
2
In the latter part of the 1800s, Lederer found over 40 instances in which unknowing people—including toddlers and teenagers—were deliberately injected with gonorrhea or syphilis in order to see if they would develop the diseases.
3
A medical journal from 1874 reveals that some doctors injected children with smallpox to test whether a previously applied vaccination was effective.
4
In 1874, Dr. Roberts Bartholow stuck electrodes into the brain of a cancer patient (who happened to be an Irish domestic servant). His report documents her blue lips, frothing at the mouth, spasms, and convulsions. When she died days later, the autopsy showed that her brain had been trashed.
5
The doctor who codiscovered the cause of leprosy was drummed out of the profession in 1880 for putting the mycobacterium in a patient's eye.
6
In 1883, the resident physician at a Hawaiian leper colony injected around 20 men, women, and girls with syphilis.
7
In the 1890s, Italian doctor Giuseppe Sanarelli jabbed at least five patients with yellow fever.
8
In 1891, a physician—apparently in Germany—removed cancerous tumors from the breasts of two women. Each time, he inserted some of the tumor into the patient's healthy breast to see if the cancer would take root.
9
Two doctors in 1895 vaccinated, then infected with smallpox, numerous boys at orphanages in Brooklyn.
10
In order to see if spinal taps were dangerous to kids, a Harvard researcher performed the agonizing procedure dozens of times on toddlers and babies fresh out of the womb in the early to mid-1890s.
11
In 1897, a Johns Hopkins researcher studied the toxicity of thyroid extract on eight mental patients.
12
In 1901, a doctor studying hookworm infection saw a patient who wanted a circumcision. Deciding to kill two birds with one stone, the doc put dirt containing hookworm larvae on the man's foreskin, implying that this was part of the procedure. The patient's penis was soon infested with the worms.
13
In the first decade of the 1900s, several physicians performed hundreds of experimental tests for tuberculosis on babies and children. One method of administration was in the eye, which caused severe pain for the youngsters.
14
A Rockefeller Institute physician gave an experimental test for syphilis—which contained the dead germs of the disease—to 400 hospital patients, including children, in 1911.
15
From 1913 till at least 1915, two doctors exposed infants—aged two days to 20 months—to repeated X rays to see how their digestive systems handled food.
16
To test his theory that syphilis bacteria were to be found in living brain tissue, a doctor used a dental drill to bore through the skulls and into the gray matter of six patients at Pontiac State Hospital in 1915. Needless to say, they had not been informed of the procedure.
17
Doctor L.L. Stanley was into the quackery of testicular transplantation. In 1920, he published an article about taking the balls from executed prisoners and putting them into still-breathing convicts, not to mention sewing ram testes into 23 other prisoners.
18
In 1921, three pediatricians deliberately induced scurvy and rickets in babies at an NYC orphanage.
19
While researching spinal taps, a physician performed lumbar punctures on 423 African American babies in Atlanta in the mid-1920s. None of them needed the excruciating procedure.
20
Germany, 1930: 76 children died from a contaminated experimental vaccine for tuberculosis.
21
In 1932, Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos published a manuscript about an experiment in which Puerto Ricans had been injected with cancer cells to study the disease's progression. At least thirteen eventually died from cancer. In his book In the Name of Science, professor Andrew Goliszek quotes lifelong human experimenter Dr. Cornelius Rhoades, who ran the experiment for the Rockefeller Institute: “The Puerto Ricans are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever to inhabit this sphere.”
22
In 1934 and 1935, over 20,000 children across the country received one of two experimental polio vaccines, one of which contained the live virus.
23
A 1942 issue of the Journal of Pediatrics features an article by a doctor who deliberately infected a 12-month-old baby with herpes. 
Stupid Government Trick
A scientist funded by the government has developed super-lethal strains of mousepox, cowpox, and rabbitpox. When tested, the mousepox killed all mice, even those that had been vaccinated against the disease. Rest easy, though. We've been assured that these 100-percent lethal bugs can't harm humans. No way. Not a chance.