Category: Human experimentation

‘A live experiment on children’

Testimony that led a High Court judge to ban NHS’s Tavistock clinic from giving puberty blocking drugs to youngsters as young as 10 who want to change sex

Daily Mail

Sanchez Manning

'A live experiment on children'
Quinn Dombrowski

The shocking evidence that convinced a High Court judge to effectively ban an NHS gender clinic from giving puberty-blocking drugs to children can be revealed for the first time today.

Until now a court order has prevented the testimony of eminent physicians being made public. But lawyers for The Mail on Sunday successfully argued there was a significant public interest in disclosing the material.

Among the devastating statements that can now be divulged is one from Professor Christopher Gillberg, an expert in child and adolescent psychiatry, who believes prescribing drugs to delay puberty – a first step in gender treatment – is a scandal and tantamount to conducting ‘a live experiment’ on vulnerable children.

‘In my years as a physician, I cannot remember an issue of greater significance for the practice of medicine,’ he said. 

‘We have left established evidence-based clinical practice and are using powerful life-altering medication for a vulnerable group of adolescents and children based upon a belief.’ . . . continue reading

Willowbrook, the institution that shocked a nation into changing its laws


Patients needing “tenderness and affection” got the opposite

Timeline

Matt Reimann

When World War II ended, a large Staten Island facility on 375 acres of land faced an uncertain future. Some believed that Willowbrook should be used for the care of disabled veterans, but ultimately the preferences of New York governor Thomas Dewey won out. Dewey argued that there were thousands of children in the state who were “mentally and physically defective and feeble minded, who never can become members of society,” who needed to be cared for with a “high degree of tenderness and affection.” On this last matter, the institution would utterly fail: In the coming decades, Willowbrook would become synonymous for social injustice, moral abhorrence, and the glaring failures of the state psychiatric system. . . [Full text]

Germany to probe Nazi-era medical science

Science

Megan Gannon

Soon after Hans-Joachim was born, it was clear that something was terribly wrong. The infant boy suffered from partial paralysis and spastic diplegia, a form of cerebral palsy. In 1934, when he was 5 years old, his parents admitted him to an asylum in Potsdam, Germany, where clinical records described Hans-Joachim as a “strikingly friendly and cheerful” child. But his condition did not improve. He spent a few years at a clinic in Brandenburg-Görden, Germany, and then, on an early spring day in 1941, he was “transfered to another asylum at the instigation of the commissar for defense of the Reich”—code words meaning that Hans-Joachim, then 12, was gassed at a Nazi “euthanasia” center. His brain was sent to a leading neuropathologist. . .  [Full text]

 

The forgotten Australian prisoners of war experimented on by the Nazis

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The Body Sphere

Amanda Smith

Not all Nazi human experimentations ended with death. Some Australian soldiers may have suffered for years after being guinea pigs for Nazi scientists. Amanda Smith tells their story.

Some of the cruellest, vilest things humans do to each other are done in wartime.

During the Second World War, one of the most shocking things that occurred – in a long list of shocking things – was human medical experimentation in Nazi concentration camps.

Until now, however, it wasn’t known that the Nazis also experimented on Australian POWs.

Konrad Kwiet is the resident historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum. He’s researching the experiments alongside surgeon and academic George Weisz. . . [Full text]

 

Austrian historians studying another informed consent debacle from the 50s

Bioedge

Michael Cook

There seems to be an unending trickle of revelations from the 1950s and 1960s about the practices of doctors who still had not learned the Nuremberg Code. The latest comes from Vienna, Austria, where researchers deliberately infected hospitalised children with malaria in the hope of finding a cure for syphilis.

An historical commission began studying the issue in 2012. It appears that between 1955 and 1960 about 230 orphaned children at the Hoff Clinic, at the Vienna University Clinic for Psychiatry and Neurology, were experimented on without their consent. Afterwards the injection the children had high fevers for two weeks and for another 20 years experienced intermittent fevers. No one appears to have died from the treatment. A complete report will be submitted next year.

Malaria therapy for syphilis may sound peculiar, but in 1927, in the days before antibiotics, Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg received a Nobel Prize in Medicine for refining the technique. He and others observed that high fevers killed the malaria parasite. This saved the patient from general paralysis and “idiocy”, but left him with fevers. However, these could be treated with quinine, so the risk seemed acceptable.

This article is published by Michael Cook and BioEdge.org under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation to Bioedge. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.