Top 7 Evil Medical Experiments
Josef Mengele
The medical progress can save lots of lives, but there are certain situations when the doctors do certain things in order to reach the progress. They often forget about the oath they swore, and they do immoral and illegal things.
The United States of America has recently apologized for the experiments which they have conducted on the prisoners and mental patients from Guatemala. In 1940 they injected syphilis into those persons in order to see the effects of the disease on the human body. The experiment from Guatemala has been just one of the horrific medical experiments which have been conducted along the course of time. Here are the top seven evil medical experiments.
The Tuskegee Study involves the United States of America again. The experiment lasted for forty years, which makes it one of the most famous lapses in medical ethics in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that in 1932 the U.S. Public Health Service started a medical program which had the task of analyzing the effects of the syphilis on the human body. The problem was that the experiment did not involve curing the syphilis, only examining the manner in which it causes damage to the body. The researchers tracked the disease in 399 African-American men from Alabama. They told them that they have nothing to worry about, as their condition is not dangerous, is just something called “bad blood”.
The problem is that the cure for syphilis existed, as penicillin did wonders against it. The doctors simply decided to leave these men in pain and suffering in order to get the desired records. Since all the men were African-American, the scandal became a racial one as well. The experiment continued up to 1972, when it was discovered and it was made public. They shut it down as a result, but who knows how much it would have continued?
This is the experiment I was talking about in the introduction of this article. Now, many people assume that the Guatemala experiment and the Tuskegee one are similar, but they are not. In the case of the Tuskegee experiment, the doctors simply watched the men without doing anything. Now, that it is very bad and immoral, but the situation with the experiments from Guatemala is even more immoral. Between 1946 and 1948 the U.S. and Guatemalan governments co-sponsored a study which involved the infection of the prisoners and mental patients from the country with syphilis.
That is right; they infected them with the terrible disease. The main task of the experiment was to test various chemicals which would be great for preventing the disease or to stop it. In case that the people got infected with syphilis, and the chemicals did not work, they received the penicillin which stopped the progress of the disease. The process of infecting the people with syphilis proved to be difficult, and the researchers had to scrape skin from their penises and then to apply the solution which contained the syphilis on the wound. In some occasions they paid prostitutes who were infected with the disease to have sex with the prisoners. The truth about the experiments was found very recently, and as a result Hilary Clinton and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized for what the U.S doctors did.
J. Marion Sims, who is considered to be the father of the modern gynecology, became famous by doing medical experiments on slave women. He brought lots of knowledge in the domain, but it has been revealed that the women had to suffer a lot because of his practices. In most of the cases, the women who had vesico-vaginal fistula, which is basically a tear between the vagina and the bladder, were incontinent, and because of this they were considered outcasts. Sims liked to do his surgeries without anesthesia, and there are two reasons for this. First of all, during those times, the anesthesia has just been discovered, and second, he stated in one of his lectures from 1857 that with anesthesia, the operations were “not painful enough to justify the trouble.” It is unknown if his patients agreed with the surgery or not, but it is believed that he forced them to do the experiments. Durrenda Ojanuga, a University of Alabama social work professor, stated in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 1993, that what he did is unacceptable.
Prior to 1830, the only bodies which were allowed for experiments were the ones of the executed murderers. They were very rare, and because of it, many anatomists had to buy bodies from the grave robbers or they had to steal the bodies themselves. William Hare, who owned the Edinburgh boardinghouse together with his friend William Burke, decided to take this activity even further. They decided that they could make serious money from selling human bodies. They decided that they should have an edge over the competition, so they found a way of providing very fresh corpses. In 1827 and 1828, they killed numerous people that stayed at the boardinghouse, and then they sold their bodies to the scientists who were interested in analyzing them. The anatomist Robert Knox was one of their regular clients, and many have wondered how come he did not realize that the bodies were so fresh. Maybe he just did not care about it. They got caught, and Burke was then hanged for what he did. That’s when the British government decided to loosen the restrictions on dissection.
