Treatment

Stephens Martha Stephens

Description

The Treatment is the story of one tragedy of medical research that stretched over eleven years and affected the lives of hundreds of people in an Ohio city. Thirty years ago the author, then an assistant professor of English, acquired a large set of little-known medical papers at her university. These documents told a grotesque story. Cancer patients coming to the public hospital on her campus were being swept into secret experiments for the U.S. military; they were being irradiated over their whole bodies as if they were soldiers in nuclear war. Of the ninety women and men exposed to this treatment, twenty-one died within a month of their radiations.Martha Stephens's report on these deaths led to the halting of the tests, but local papers did not print her charges, and for many years people in Cincinnati had no way of knowing that lethal experiments had taken place there. In 1994 other military tests were brought to light, and a yellowed copy of Stephens's original report was delivered to a television newsroom. In Ohio, major publicity ensued-at long last-and reached around the world. Stephens uncovered the names of the victims, and a legal action was filed against thirteen researchers and their institutions. A federal judge compared the deeds of the doctors to the medical crimes of the Nazis during World War II and refused to dismiss the researchers from the suit. After many bitter disputes in court, they agreed to settle the case with the families of those they had afflicted. In 1999 a memorial plaque was raised in a yard of the hospital.Who were these doctors and why had they done as they did? Who were the people whose lives they took? Who was the reporter who could not forget the story, the young attorney who first developed the case, the judge who issued the historic ruling against the doctors? This is Stephens's moving account of all that transpired in these lives and her own during this epic battle between medicine and human rights.

Sujets

• USA
• Medical research
• History of medicine
• Human rights
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 23 janvier 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822383758
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Treatment

             

The

The Story of Those Who Died

in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests

Treatment

                                     

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

—           

This book is dedicated to the ninety victims of the human

radiation experiments in Cincinnati General Hospital (–);

it has been written so that history may remember their injuries and

afflictions, and their unwitting sacrifice in a project sponsored by

the U.S. Department of Defense and carried out by researchers in

the College of Medicine of the University of Cincinnati.

Preface

Prologue

xi

xix

       .             

                        

. The First Public Knowledge of the Tests

.  and a Secret Drawer Reopened

. The Press in Full Flower



. African Americans Lost and Found

. The Back Files

. Testimonies





. Author’s Intermezzo









       .               

. The Mother Without a Name

. The Final Years



. The Experiments Must Cease





         .             

. A Civil Action

. An Angry Judge



. The Case Closed





Appendix . Table of Cincinnati Radiations



Appendix . Hearing Testimony of Eugene Saenger

Notes

Sources

Index









Contents