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Against Their Will
The Secret History of Medical Experimentation
on Children in Cold War America
by Allen M. Hornblum, Judith L. Newman and Gregory J. Dober
Palgrave MacMillan
When Charles Dyer was 8 years old, in the late 1940s, his alcoholic parents sent him to a reform school in Massachusetts where instead of attending classes, children were forced to do various forms of work, including being strapped to harnesses as if they were horses, then “pull[ing] a plank with a rug wrapped around it to wax the wooden floors” for hours on end.
Sadly, things would only get worse for Dyer.
The heartbreaking “Against Their Will” tells of our country’s shocking history of using low-functioning children, among other disadvantaged populations, in harmful, painful and sometimes even deadly medical experiments.
In his early teens, Dyer wound up at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Mass. Fernald housed “nearly 2,000 children and adults with a stunning array of afflictions and disabilities,” although some kids were placed there for simply having low IQs or slight behavioral problems. These children were placed alongside “many severely impaired people,” with one student later describing the place as “a combination of prison and human zoo.”
The children there were beaten, and sexual abuse was constant.
Given their dreary, isolated lives, it seemed like a treat that day in 1950 when about 20 of the kids were introduced to outsiders from MIT and told they had a chance to participate in something called the Science Club.
The children were very excited.
“We never got out of Fernald. It was terrible in there,” one of those boys, Gordon Shattuck, said decades later. “They were offering us trips to Fenway Park to see the Boston Red Sox and the Boston Braves and to go to MIT for parties and tours of the college. We all thought it was wonderful.”
Dyer says they were even promised Mickey Mouse watches.
Sadly, many details about Science Club had been left out.
RADIOACTIVE OATMEAL
The children were isolated from the general population and required to eat “every bite” of a bowl of oatmeal each morning. They also had needles plunged into them six times a day to take their blood, and gave four urine samples daily, always with nurses looking on.
After a short time, the boys wanted out. But when Shattuck made that request, he found, to his horror, that getting out was not an option.
The 12-year-old refused to allow any more blood to be drawn and was sent to Ward 22, “a building with six special punishment cells.”
“They put me in a little room with bare walls and an old ratty mattress and a can to piss in,” said Shattuck, who was fed only bread and water for the first several days. After eight days, he could take no more and was returned to the program and the dreaded needles.
When Science Club member Dyer staged his own rebellion, his was even more defiant — and equally fruitless.
“Dyer climbed up a support column toward the ceiling and shimmied across a crossbeam high above the floor,” the authors write.
“The standoff lasted for hours, and with each passing hour, the staff grew frantic. Visions of a 12-year-old boy falling 30 feet to his death shot through everyone’s mind.”
Four hours later, Dyer was back on the ground — and right back in Science Club.
The boys — and countless others subjected to this over several decades — didn’t learn the true nature of these experiments until 1993, when a Boston Globe exposé revealed that their daily oatmeal had been “mixed with radioactive milk,” and that they had also “digest[ed] a series of iron supplements that gave them the radiation-equivalent of at least 50 chest X-rays.” The experiment was designed to test calcium absorption. It was funded by the US Atomic Energy Commission — and Quaker Oats.
DISCARDED CHILDREN
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, children perceived to be mentally handicapped, slow or even just mischievous or withdrawn were often sent away to institutions with names like “the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth” — the original name of the Fernald school.
The concept of eugenics was beginning to take hold, and it became common perception in America that one’s biological make-up was the sole determinant of one’s lot in life. The disadvantaged, then, were seen as a drag on society. The prevailing thought was that the country’s betters should be encouraged to breed, while these others — openly derided with terms like “morons,” “idiots,” and “gargoyles” — should not.
With the endorsement of such esteemed citizens as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and former president Theodore Roosevelt, it was a short leap to accepting that when medical science needed human subjects for experiments, these very same deficient humans would serve as the perfect lab rats.
This attitude became even worse by World War II, when the military increasingly needed cures for diseases our soldiers might encounter overseas; and the Cold War, which spurred a decades-long competitiveness, especially in areas of science, between the US and the Soviet Union.
Regulations surrounding medical experimentation were so lax after World War II that one doctor recalls how if he wanted to “try a drug at a state hospital . . . I went around with a cart and a syringe and asked patients if they would mind if I could try something on them. There was no paperwork involved. Some doctors didn’t even bother asking permission.”
CASTRATION, LSD, TB
As such, cruel experimentation went on here for almost a century, leaving this book filled with stories that are hard to read without causing a flush of anger.
In 1883, Dr. F. Hoyt Pilcher “castrated nearly six dozen boys at the Institute for Imbeciles and Weak Minded Children in Winfield, Kansas,” for the sake of curing “confirmed masturbators” from their evil habit. Pilcher’s action was deemed a success, as “the masturbation had ceased.”
Some doctors of the time tested a new smallpox vaccine by “injecting children with the active virus after vaccinating them.” Another doctor, for experimental purposes, “innoculated” a 4-year-old boy “suffering from idiocy and chronic epilepsy” with gonorrhea.
In the early 20th century, researchers seeking a cure for tuberculosis dropped a solution with tuberculin into the eyes of 3- and 4-year-old children at the Catholic St. Vincent’s Home for Orphans in Philadelphia. The result was nauseatingly predictable, as the children would “lie in their beds moaning all night from the pain in their eyes.” In a similar study, some of the children had their hands bound for the first 12 hours, so they wouldn’t rub their eyes.
Starting in the 1950s, Dr. Saul Krugman would spend a decade “feeding virus-laden stool to mentally retarded, indigent children” at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, in an effort to learn more about hepatitis. Many of these children came down with hepatitis with jaundice, leading them to suffer from “fever, vomiting, diarrhea, [and] enlargement of the liver.”
While the book overwhelmingly focuses on the cruelty of these experiments, it does touch on the other side of the ethical quandary. While Krugman’s experiments were undoubtedly awful, they were also valuable, including allowing him to identify, for the first time, that there were two strains of hepatitis and to develop a vaccine for one of these, hepatitis B.
But it’s hard to justify that the likes of electroshock, lobotomy, ringworm and even LSD were tested on children sometimes as young as several days old.
STUTTERING TORTURE
Other times, the research/torture was not physical, but psychological.
In the mid-1930s, a University of Iowa professor, speech pathologist and former stammerer named Wendell Johnson, came to believe that stuttering had psychological, not biological, causes.
To prove this revolutionary theory, he went to the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home, and suggested an experiment as a thesis subject for one of his graduate students, Mary Tudor.
She and her team selected “22 subjects: 10 stutters and 12 normal speakers,” then randomly assigned them to two groups.
Those in the control group would be just fine.
The experimental group consisted of stutters and non-stutters, but all were to be treated like stutterers, having their “stuttering” pointed out to them — even if it didn’t exist — and being “sternly [lectured] when they repeated a word, mispronounced it or even stopped mid-sentence. Speaking, in essence, was to be made an ordeal.”
Tudor also instructed the matrons at the orphanage to do the same to the children when she was not there.
One subject in the study was Mary Korlaske, “a 12-year-old with an IQ of 81” who had been there for five years. Initially, Korlaske was “smitten” with Tudor, as she wondered if Tudor was to be her new mother.
During their first interview, Tudor asked the girl questions, but “frequently interrupted her and told her she was beginning to stutter. She went on to sternly warn Mary that if she didn’t address the problem quickly, she would go through life with a pronounced stutter.”
Any correctives offered by Tudor, including demands such as, “Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth,” “Watch your speech all the time,” and “Do anything to keep from stuttering,” were “really psychological trapdoors and tricks — ‘negative therapy‘ designed to make Mary more self-conscious about her speech.”
That first day, Tudor noted that Korlaske “reacted to the suggestion immediately and her repetitions in speech were more frequent.”
This went on, for Korlaske and others, for four months.
At the end, “of the key experimental groups, five of the six once-normal speakers were now stuttering, and three of the five stutterers had further deteriorated in their speaking ability.”
The experiment also had “a dramatic effect on their behavior, their schoolwork and their relations with other children and orphanage staff.” When members of that staff contacted Johnson about the problem, he sent Tudor back to see if positive therapy could reverse the problem they had created.
It could not.
In the ensuing years, Johnson only realized the horrific nature of his study when informed by his students, who named it the “Monster Study,” and “compared [it] . . . to what the Allies had discovered upon entering Ravensbruck, Treblinka and Dachau.”
Korlaske didn’t learn why she had been put through this ordeal until 2001, when the San Jose Mercury News ran an investigative report on the study. Then 75 years old, she had gone through her entire life with “a very poor self-image . . . afraid to speak out.”
Enraged, she wrote a letter to Tudor, then 84. “I remember your face, how kind you were and you looked like my mother . . . But you were ther [sic] to destroy my life,” she wrote, also calling Tudor a “monster” and a “Nazi.” (The University of Iowa apologized but did not change the name of its Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center. Six of the orphans sued in 2007 and won a $925,000 settlement.)
MOVING ABROAD
It was only in “the last quarter of the 20th century” that these practices fell out of favor in the US. However, this has merely led researchers to take their work overseas, out of the reach of federal regulations and with far less chance of facing lawsuits.
Rather than this abhorrence having come to an end, the young American victims of these horrible tortures have simply been replaced. The orphanages and institutions that supplied medical researchers with powerless human subjects in the past, the authors write, “have been replaced by China, India, Tunisia and Nigeria.”