For the Good of Mankind? by Vicki Oransky Wittenstein

You’ll also learn about radiation experimentation and present-day clinical trials that prove fatal. You’ll read about orphans injected with lethal tuberculosis and concentration camp inmates tortured by Nazi doctors. Take a harrowing journey through some of history’s greatest medical advances-and its most horrifying medical atrocities. How do doctors balance the need to test new medicines and procedures with their ethical and moral duty to protect the rights of human subjects? What price has been paid for medical knowledge? Can we learn from the mistakes of the past? Even in the twenty-first century-despite laws, regulations, and ethical conventions-the tension between medical experimentation and patient rights continues. Some even died as a result of the procedures. The subjects suffered excruciating pain and humiliation. But they also violated the rights of their subjects, many of whom did not give their consent to the experiments. Result: A better understanding of the effects of radioactivity on the human body.Įxperimental incidents such as these paved the way for crucial medical discoveries and lifesaving cures and procedures. Result: The beginnings of modern gynecology.Įxperiment: From 1946 to 1953, seventy-four boys are fed oatmeal laced with radioactive iron and calcium.

From The Jacket FlapĮxperiment: A child is deliberately infected with the deadly smallpox disease without his parents’ informed consent.Įxperiment: A slave woman is forced to undergo more than thirty operations without anesthesia. Vicki’s nonfiction young adult book, For the Good Of Mankind? The Shameful History of Human Medical Experimentation (Twenty-First Century/Lerner, October 2013), was a Spring 2013 Junior Library Guild selection.

For the Good of Mankind? by Vicki Oransky Wittenstein