I know not why people do evil. One cause may be the dark nature of the human soul. Another reason may be due to a high-level intelligence coupled with zero morality.
Finally, evil may come to pass in the guise of good intentions. After all, you can't pave your way to hell without them.
These are some stories where morality is in question or nowhere to be found. No matter the reason for the experiments presented today, the result was trauma and suffering for the victims of science in their day.
Cauterization circumcision destroyed his penis. At the age of 38, he took his own life.
David Peter Reimer and his brother were identical twins. When they were about 7-months old, they developed phimosis. Phimosis is a condition where the foreskin appears defective and makes for difficult urination.
Doctors had an idea. They could perform an easy circumcision to remove the problematic foreskin to eliminate the problem. Implementation of this solution came in the form of an inexperienced doctor and defective equipment. The result was a maimed 7-month old David Peter Reimer.
Doctors had another idea. Since they monumentally screwed up this procedure, they should wait to see if the phimosis would go away naturally. It did. Avoiding the method spared David's twin brother Brian from potential maiming.
Concerned about David's well-being, his parents had no idea how to help their son. They could try and have his penis reconstructed, but there was no proof that it would ever function normally. John Money, an arrogant yet cunning psychologist, told his parents that if they just raised David as a girl given proper hormonal therapy, the child would group up happy. The parents consented and did as recommended. However, the treatments never took. Their son David never accepted the changes occurring within him. Money, on the other hand, only reported the brilliant success of the Reimer case.
At the age of 14, David stopped accepting any more treatments and learned the truth from his father. David began readjusting to a male body and even got a reconstructed penis. Over the years, he fell in love, got married, and adopted children.
During David's traumatizing life experience, John Money made bank. While he suffered, John made sure to exclude any adverse experience from his talks, interviews, or book publications. John made sure he capitalized upon David's fake transgender reports to become a most sought-after expert.
The trauma of his ordeal, however, never escaped him. His life began to unravel after his brother Brian took his own life. Soon after, David took his own.
Libby Zion was a freshman admitted to the New York Cornell Medical Center with complaints of fever and other abnormalities. She didn't leave the hospital alive the following day.
There are plenty of occupations that require long working hours. If you work a job requiring you to work all day or even during the night, you fall into this category. It's the nature of the job. You need to work to pay for the things you think you need. Eventually, we will become fatigued.
If you're fatigued while you do anything, expect to make mistakes. You aren't as attentive as you think you are during this time. Stop being stubborn and arrogant. Unfortunately, we can't help who we are, but society makes amends. Numerous laws are in place that punishes us, for instance, if we get behind the wheel of a vehicle while we're tired. In my case, worry about fatigue while driving helps drive me to get more sleep or drink coffee before I drive a car.
What about the medical community? Indeed, people with an understanding of medicine know about the impact of fatigue and have processes in place to mitigate risks.
The medical staff never determined the cause of her fever. The physicians attending her were new. One had less than a year of training while the other had less than two years of training. During Libby's stay at the hospital, medically licensed doctors gave her a mix of chemicals meant to calm her. Instead, it killed her.
I wonder how many situations like this occurred without our knowledge. If this happened to my child, perhaps the world might not hear my cries to the skies. Libby's father, Sidney, however, was a journalist.
An influential columnist, Signey's work to discover the cause of her death eventually lead to a grand jury exploring charges of murder, malpractice, and negligence. In 1986, a New York Grand Jury declared that the cause of her death was due to inadequate training, supervision, and fatigue resulting from 36-hour shifts. Some time afterward, New York implemented the first 80-hr maximum resident working hour limit.
The medical industry has feelings too. They probably felt unjustly punished because of one instance. Who, better than they would know what's best for themselves and their patients. Here's a question. Is there a difference in the impact of patient safety between residents that work reduced or longer hours? Let's find out!
The medical community decided to conduct experiments throughout participating hospitals. They wanted to know the impact of fatigue resulting from extended working hours on patients. Consent to participate in this study by residents wasn't informed, but instead, implied. Researchers held that if residents wanted to train in their hospitals, then they would like to participate.
No patients were notified of this experiment either by implied or informed consent. The hospitals participating in the studies never told patients as they felt they didn't require notification.
One doctor participating in iCompare referred to a lack of patient consent as an "interesting conundrum". He also stated that while he made errors caused by fatigue, he doesn't know that a shorter or longer shift could have affected the mistakes made.
Wendell Johnson experienced much strife in his youth due to stuttering. His condition, as well as a need to overcome it, drove him to prestigious positions in research. He became world-renowned for his efforts in speech therapy. One experiment, in particular, draws our attention today because in his efforts to cure stuttering, he, instead, traumatized children that later became traumatized adults.
Mary Tudor carried out Wendell's experiment on two unsuspecting groups of 22 orphans. Each group consisted of children who both normally and stuttered. One group received positive comments about their performance during speech tests. "Great Job" or "You'll improve no matter what anyone says" were common phrases uttered by the researchers. The other experimental group received negative feedback.
In review, the results of the study were inconclusive. There was no evidence subjecting children to positive or negative feedback either eliminated or caused stuttering. It did, however, demonstrate that it would make children more withdrawn, isolated, and depressed. The experiment impacted some of these children, now adults, decades later. The adults settled with the Iowa University that allowed the study in 2007.
According to the late Lauretta Bender, Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) is a benefit to humanity. It produces positive effects. When applied to children, ECT elicits appropriate behavior. Lauretta believed this so wholly that she subjected children as young as three to the procedure.
Like John Money and Wendell Johnson in this article, Lauretta seems to have published only the positive results of the research. Peer-review of her work showed quite a different picture. In one of her cases, the child subjected to ECT became relatively successful in their life as a lawyer. In another, the child became a multiple-murderer sentenced to life in prison.
A 72-year old Japanese farmer describes his first time performing vivisection on another human being. Vivisection is performing operations for experimentation. During his time in Unit-731, the farmer described cutting into a prisoner from the chest to the stomach.
Unit-731 was a segment of the Japanese army that researched biological warfare. They intended to develop weapons they could deploy against the United States.
During a New York Times interview, the old farmer, under conditions of anonymity, stated experiments required a subject's vivisection following infection. Vivisection was warranted to observe the infections' impact on internal organs. The prisoner was dissected alive, but certainly not without reason. If the Japanese used anesthetic on the prisoners, the drugs might interfere with the test results.
You can't deploy a weapon until you test its effectiveness. Horrendous experiments occurred to try the efficiency of any number of biological weapons. The test subjects didn't appear to matter—the Japanese of those times experimented on everyone in their custody.
Unit-731 tested plague bombs by dropping them upon Chinese cities. Through these bombings, they determined their bombs were effective in spreading the plague. Their ultimate goal was to drops bombs of these types upon strategic areas in California.
One of the more disturbing experiences in Unit-731 involved observation of experiments. Emotionless researchers perpetrated it. In the case of the old farmer, the only emotion he may have exhibited was frustration. It was challenging to carry out your experiments when your test subjects kept screaming.
Part of the interview reveals the story of a russian mother and child and their exposure exposed to chemicals for testing efficacy. The mother, in her desperation, tried to shield her daughter from the effects of the gas. She must have watched her daughter sicken immediately and start convulsing. Watching your child die as you begin to pass yourself surely is an experience fit for hell.
During WWII, Makino was a surgeon ordered to perform amputations, dissections, and anything else Japan desired on everyone from prisoners to children. Why did he do it? According to Makino, disobedience meant death. Failure to follow his orders meant his superiors would have killed him. Decades later, still haunted by memories, Makino now tells his story along with others so that the message could get out now that they were closer to death.
The activities of Unit-731 were horrid beyond comparison but also very difficult to research at my level. It appears that, until recently, no one working within the group talked about Unit-731 activities. I also don't know if any trials have occurred.
Japan claims no responsibility to compensate any victims.
Dr. Saul Krugman and Joan Giles utilized residents at the Willowbrook State School to perform Hepatitis testing with the hopes of developing a vaccine. Willowbrook ran rampant with cases of Hepatitis already, so infecting patients not having the disease wouldn't have caused so much concern-or, so they thought.
They set out to perform experiments upon "50 mentally disabled children" between 5 and 10 years old. When questioned about the need for human versus animal experimentation, doctors responded that animal experimentation was too expensive. The rationale was that most of the kids would get infected anyway, so possibly getting hepatitis from experimentation would have been out of the ordinary. According to the doctors, the ends justified the means.
Children were infected with the virus and re-infected if they recovered. The intent was to see if the body could develop an immune response. While the research eventually led to a greater understanding of the disease, it was certainly not without its detractors. Scores of people protested at medical conferences. An expose done by Geraldo Rivera eventually led to the passage of laws protecting the rights of patients in institutions.
Yet, Krugman was rewarded for his work despite the controversies. In the same year the Tuskegee experiments were revealed to the public, he headed the American Pediatric Society for his efforts.
We see today similarities between the rush to develop a vaccine for COVID that we did for Hepatitis. The medical industry uses similar methods as Krugman's to develop the COVID-19 vaccine. Patients are given the disease without treatment to determine how long the body would recover. Patients would also be given the plasma of recovered subjects to see if that would speed up recovery.
Animal experimentation would take too long as the world became desperate for protection. The difference, perhaps, in this case, is that the industry didn't use children. As far as I know, all participants in vaccine development were consenting adults. However, history tells us another story about the behaviors of humanity.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Thank you for reading and following on throughout my Hive journey. Never stop questioning the world around you.
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