Book Review

摘要

In the 1950s, ‘moronic’ children at the Walter E. Fernald School in Massachusetts were given the opportunity to join a science club. Excited, a number of enthusiastic pupils enrolled unaware that they would be providing the raw human material for a range of institutional experiments involving the endless consumption of oatmeal, isolation and a relentless routine of daily injections and providing urine and faeces samples. Decades later, it transpired that their oatmeal had been mixed with radioactive milk; an initiative knowingly sponsored by Quaker Oats and the US Atomic Energy Commission. explores how the social value of certain disadvantaged population groups became undermined by early twentieth century eugenics. The authors maintain that this encouraged aspiring, often fame-hungry, medical researchers to use the institutionalised for the study of human illness. In addition, the Cold War created an environment that supported and sanctioned human experimentation. This underpinning meta-narrative fails to fully engage with the inherent complexity of twentieth century medical ethics or to comprehensively situate the experiments investigated against the dramatic shift in bioethical behaviour and regulation that occurred in that century. Nonetheless, Hornblum, Newman and Dober offer a thoroughly researched and well-written account of a highly sensitive and emotionally charged topic that recounts the perspectives of a range of involved actors including experimental victims, parents, institutional staff and medical researchers.