A somewhat overwritten eye-opener about medical advances achieved on the backs of society’s weakest members.
The harrowing story of the exploitation of institutionalized children in American medical research.
Until the late 20th century, doctors routinely experimented on the so-called idiots, morons and feebleminded of America’s orphanages and hospitals to test vaccines and procedures. Warehoused in places like the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth, the “genetically unfit” became ready test subjects for cure-seeking researchers from MIT, Harvard and other universities. In their revealing account, Hornblum (Sentenced to Science: One Black Man's Story of Imprisonment in America, 2007, etc.), Newman (Human Development and Family Studies/Penn State, Abington) and medical journalist Dober focus on the personal motives and societal forces that prompted this dark, little-understood chapter in medical history. The publication of Paul De Kruif’s best-selling Microbe Hunters (1926) and other admiring books glorified medical researchers and convinced the public that doctors could do no wrong, and the eugenics movement taught disdain for the weak and institutionalized. Ultimately, the feebleminded became convenient test subjects for unethical experimentation. Many researchers, including dermatologists, dentists and psychologists, were motivated by noble causes; others sought fame and wealth. Like policemen upholding the “blue wall of silence,” the medical establishment looked the other way, knowing full well that experiments involving radiation and crude lobotomies were harmful and conducted without parental consent. The book is filled with vivid stories of researchers, many well-known, spurred on by Cold War pressures to discover cures and preventives, who experimented on children with fungicides, radioactive milk, LSD and birth-control injections. Their work stemmed from “an exploitative ethos that reeked of both eugenics and paternalism,” write the authors, who note that these unethical practices ended several decades ago with the introduction of medical safeguards and oversight committees. They also write that U.S. drug testing has been conducted in China, India and other nations ever since.
A somewhat overwritten eye-opener about medical advances achieved on the backs of society’s weakest members.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-230-34171-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
