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    Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America
    Unavailable
    Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America
    Unavailable
    Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America
    Ebook434 pages8 hours

    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

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    During the Cold War, an alliance between American scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and the US military pushed the medical establishment into ethically fraught territory. Doctors and scientists at prestigious institutions were pressured to produce medical advances to compete with the perceived threats coming from the Soviet Union. In Against Their Will, authors Allen Hornblum, Judith Newman, and Gregory Dober reveal the little-known history of unethical and dangerous medical experimentation on children in the United States. Through rare interviews and the personal correspondence of renowned medical investigators, they document how children—both normal and those termed "feebleminded"—from infants to teenagers, became human research subjects in terrifying experiments. They were drafted as "volunteers" to test vaccines, doused with ringworm, subjected to electric shock, and given lobotomies. They were also fed radioactive isotopes and exposed to chemical warfare agents. This groundbreaking book shows how institutional superintendents influenced by eugenics often turned these children over to scientific researchers without a second thought. Based on years of archival work and numerous interviews with both scientific researchers and former test subjects, this is a fascinating and disturbing look at the dark underbelly of American medical history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJun 25, 2013
    ISBN9781137363459
    Unavailable
    Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America
    Author

    Allen M. Hornblum

    Allen M. Hornblum is the author of five books, including Acres of Skin and Sentenced to Science. His work has been featured on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, NPR’s Fresh Air, BBC World Service, and The New York Times.

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    Reviews for Against Their Will

    3.5/5

    20 ratings8 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I struggled with this book mightily. While the topic and content are interesting in a mystifyingly bizarre way, it often suffered from choppy anecdotes, incomplete information, and repetitive prose. This is a book that needed to be written, without a doubt. Cataloging the series of abuses imposed on the weakest members of society is a history that we must face. In terms of execution, however, I found it lacking.
    • 3/5
      "Against Their Will" documents the shocking use of institutionalized American children and adults in medical experiments. As such, the book documents a largely untold, dark side of recent history, and raises serious ethical questions. That such experimentation could never occur today is because of strict ethical, legal, and institutional rules set up to prevent it, rules that were established to prevent anything like this sort of abuse from ever happening again. Despite its merits, the book has its flaws. First, notwithstanding the book's subtitle, most of the experimentation in question had nothing whatsoever to do with "the Cold War". While highly unethical by today's standards, the experimentation was done with the goal of developing vaccines and procedures to improve healthcare for people in general. The goals were medical, not political. What's more, much of the experimentation described long predates the 1950s through 1970s, so even the historical framework is wrongly presented. Second, the book tends towards sensationalism. Third, too much of the book relies on anecdotes and opinion. Thus claims and accusations are offered without documentation, to a degree that can only be labeled as irresponsible. This book had the prospect of being a powerful expose, but the authors sacrifice objectivity and the hard work of documentation for the sake of moral outrage. The issues are serious, and deserve a more careful exploration. Nonetheless, "Against Their Will" brings the issues to the fore.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      This book tries to emulate other books on wrongful medical experimentation on the human species --- children in this case. The book is well footnoted. But the subject cannot be adequately covered in a mere 219 pages. A structure such as the 480 page book by Eileen Welsome's "Plutonium Files" (a 489 page treatment) would have been more informative and revealing.
    • 4/5
      An important, powerful, well-researched, clearly written book. It may be a bit too powerful for some. I found it extremely triggering and had to skip and skim large sections, so I recommend other reviews if you're looking for a detailed response.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This book started out very slow and dull. It was so-and-so went to this facility and experimented on children, which was bad. The authors didn't provide much detail about what was tested, how it affected the children, and how society benefited. This changed in the last half of the book when the psychological experiments started. Some of the activities of the doctors reminded one of Nazi doctors in the concentration camps. I don't think I'll take anything a doctor says at complete face value after reading Against Their Will.
    • 3/5
      There's a lot of really interesting information in this book, and it's a history that should be more well known. The writing in general is good, but the organization is bad and the writing is sometimes repetitive. Each experiment is also covered quite briefly, so be prepared to look for other books if particular issues grab you.The title/cover is also a bit sensationalistic given how few experiments in the book actually had anything to do with the Cold War, and how much of it was devoted to other time periods entirely. It is more like the shortest book it was possible to write on the general history of child experimentation in the 20th century. In the later chapters many of the stories aren't actually experiments, just questionable practices doctors embraced with vigor regardless of how little research had been done.A frequent refrain is "Doctors in the US didn't pay any attention to the Nuremberg code at all." There's a chapter about WWII and the Nuremberg code but that line is still repeated frequently (numerous times in a single chapter) in reference to individual doctors/experiments. There are some other specific ideas that are over-repeated as well (such as researchers specifically choosing devalued populations vs college prep schools).The individual sections on vaccine research, radiation research, etc... aren't organized chronologically and sometimes aren't organized in a logical way at all. There's also a slight tendency to leave out dates when something prior to 1945 is being talked about it, or sometimes the date is mentioned towards the end of the story that's being related, which is always frustrating, but especially so in a book that jumps around so much and mentions so many different experiments.Again, lots of interesting information here, but it could have been presented so much more effectively and with a less misleading title.
    • 4/5
      This is a work that, at times, is very difficult to read. The many examples that the authors give of instances of experiments being performed on children are astounding. What most struck me as I was reading was that findings and advances that were the results of these studies still impact all Americans today. Towards the last third of the book I felt that a good deal of information was repeated.
    • 3/5
      “Against their will: The secret history of medical experimentation on children in cold war America” has been a difficult book for me to review. Written by three physicians, Allen Hornblum, Judith Newman, and Gregory Dober, the book discuss’ many of the ethical failures physicians have made using human guinea pigs but it manages not to have any real villains. I can’t say it is a sugar coated look at human vivisection but it is definitely human vivisection lite. The medical research that the book describes did, of course, happen but the book’s thesis, even it’s title, is disproved by the very evidence that is supposed to support it. First, minor’s do not have legal standing to choose to be in or out of experiments. Therefore how can it be against their will? If there were parents with legal standing they were never asked for permission in any way that gave them the information they would need to give informed consent. How can it be against their will? The institutions that had many of these children as wards, the institutions that had the legal authority to give permission to use some of these children as human guinea pigs did give permission. Most importantly, the author’s thesis that it was the Cold War that caused medical researchers to resort to children as test subjects is repeatedly shown to be false by discussing experiments that took place before and after the Cold War. How can we think that the Cold War influenced experiments decades before there was such a thing as the Cold War? The fact is that medical research has been performed on the weak and defenseless for as long as there has been medical research. The professor in my medical history class told me never to trust medical history written by doctors, they have too much skin in the game. Still, in spite of failing to prove the authors thesis the book is both well researched and well written. It should serve as an introduction to the evil that men, and women, do in search of fame and fortune. I am unconvinced that serving humanity is anyone in this book’s motivation. If you are interested in the ethical failures of medical researchers and want to see it through the unbiased eyes of a non-physician look at Harriet Washington’s “Medical apartheid : the dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present”.