Can you
trust the doctor? I read the book 'Human Guinea Pigs', by Doctor Maurice
Pappworth, many years ago. First published in 1967, the book revealed how
unsuspecting patients of the "hospital class" in Britain, were being
used as “guinea pigs" in medical
experiments by hospital doctors, often at British teaching hospitals, during
the 1960s.
The book
described how some hospital doctors were treating their patients with as much
respect as laboratory rats, and we're sometimes, killing them in the process.
The experiments were never carried out on private patients in Britain, and were
often unnecessary, for the treatment of their disease. They were sacrificed to
science by "wolves in white coats",
said one reviewer.
Pappworth
was considered a "pestilential
nuisance" by many of his colleagues within the medical profession.
When it became known that he was going to publish his findings, he was subject
to threats and intimidation from strangers, in an attempt to get him to abandon
the project. He was accused of doing a great disservice to his profession and
of undermining the faith and trust, that lay people have in their doctor. He
was repeatedly blackballed from the routine award of a fellowship from the
Royal College of Physicians and was told at one interview for a consultancy
post, that "no Jew could ever be a
gentleman."
Maurice
Pappworth was a whistleblower before the term was ever invented. The
incidents that Maurice Pappworth described in his book ranged over more than 20
years, but in the main, what had occurred within the last 10 years, within
Britain and America. He wrote:
"It must be emphasized that, whilst the vast
majority of patients in hospitals are not subjected to experimentation, the
number who are, is considerable, although exact figures cannot be known."
Medical
experiments were not just carried out in hospitals, but we're also carried out
in prisons, orphanages and psychiatric centres, too. Pappworth had been told by
medical students how they were coerced into finding 'volunteers' for their bosses research projects and that such
patients often believed the research was part of their treatment, and were
rarely told what was involved.
Delving into
medical journals, Pappworth found that abuses were happening on a shocking
scale, involving thousands of victims. He wrote letters of protest to medical
journals, but few were published. Human Guinea Pigs, catalogued more than 200
examples of abusive research carried out in the U.K. and U.S. Pappworth named
names and many publisher's backed off from publishing the book. Among those he
named, no doctor or hospital ever sued him.
Doctors injected
unsuspecting people with malaria parasites, meningitis bacteria, live polio
virus and live cancer cells. More than 40 people with diabetes, including
children, had their insulin withheld so they became comatose, after which
samples of their liver and kidney, were taken for analysis.
Pappworth
discovered that U.S. hospitals were carrying out experiments for the Los Alamos
nuclear laboratory, to inject plutonium into people with cancer, to find out
what was a "safe" dose of
radiation for those working on nuclear bombs.
Two
four-month-old hydrocephalic infants were used to investigate the safety of
giving ammonium chloride intravenously in large amounts of children. In 1962, a
new antibiotic designed to treat acne vulgaris (pimples), was investigated. The
antibiotics was given to 50 people with acne who were either juvenile
delinquents or mental defectives. After oral administration of the drug, for
two weeks, fifty percent of the children, were found to have sustained liver
damage.
An anonymous
author, with a sense of wit, wrote to the British Medical Journal saying:
"Juvenile delinquency in the USA,
seems to carry with it hazards not previously suspected. The pimpled gangster
of today may find himself the bilious guinea pig of tomorrow. It seems a little
hard, perhaps, for a boy who has spent his formative years learning how to
dodge flick knives, to fall victim to intercostal perforation by a liver
puncture needle."
In January
1963, 'Pertinax' wrote in the British
Medical Journal: "One of the nicest
American scientists I know, was heard to say, 'Criminals in our penitentiaries
are fine experimental material - and much cheaper than chimpanzees! I hope the
chimpanzees don't come to hear of this'."
In 1944, in
a Chicago prison and a New Jersey reformatory, convict volunteers were infected
with malaria to try a new cure. On 12 July 1963, 'Time' magazine wrote that volunteers at the Ohio State Penitentiary
in Columbus, had been injected with live cancer cells. None of them developed
cancer. At Cook County Jail in Chicago, prison volunteers were injected with
blood from patients who had leukaemia. None of those contracted the disease
either. At the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, the medical director had made deals
with pharmaceutical companies to test out new drugs on prisoners.
In his book,
Maurice Pappworth pulled no punches, comparing the situation to the foul work
that had been carried out by doctors in the Nazi concentration camps. The book
led to a rethinking about ethical standards in medicine. But this was an era,
when British doctors could seemingly do no wrong. Pappworth noted that many
doctors had near contempt for both their patients and the notion of consent. One
researcher told him that it was "useless
to explain to a charwoman what was going to be done, because she couldn't
possibly understand."
The world
needs more whistleblowers like Maurice Pappworth, but they won't be thanked. It
was only in 1993, 57 years after he qualified for it, and a year before he
died, aged 83, that Pappworth was sufficiently forgiven to be made a fellow of
the Royal College of Physicians.
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