Long before the U.S. government began conducting secret radiation and germ-warfare experiments, and long before the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, medical professionals had introduced -- and hotly debated the ethics of -- the use of human subjects in medical experiments. In Subjected to Science, Susan Lederer provides the first full-length history of biomedical research with human subjects in the earlier period, from 1890 to 1940.
Lederer offers detailed accounts of experiments -- benign and otherwise -- conducted on both healthy and unhealthy men, women, and children, including the yellow fever experiments (which ultimately became the subject of a Broadway play and Hollywood film), Udo Wile's "dental drill" experiments on insane patients, and Hideyo Noguchi's syphilis experiments, which involved injecting a number of healthy children and adults with the syphilis germ, luetin.
