Please welcome Tom's Journal to the mighty fine blogroll. If you want to read something troubling, check this out. Here's a little bit:
1796 - Edward Jenner injects healthy eight-year-old James Phillips first with cowpox then three months later with smallpox and is hailed as discoverer of smallpox vaccine.
1896 - Dr. Arthur Wentworth performs spinal taps on 29 children at Children's Hospital in Boston to determine if procedure is harmful.
1900 - Walter Reed injects 22 Spanish immigrant workers in Cuba with the agent for yellow fever paying them $100 if they survive and $200 if they contract the disease.
1935 - The Pellagra Incident. After millions of individuals die from Pellagra over a span of two decades, the U.S. Public Health Service finally acts to stem the disease. The director of the agency admits it had known for at least 20 years that Pellagra is caused by a niacin deficiency but failed to act since most of the deaths occurred within poverty-stricken black populations.
Being a Desert Storm veteran, and having been injected with "Vaccine 'A' " while over there, I have more than a passing interest in this kind of stuff.
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2 comments:
Walter Reed did more than inject Spanish immigrant workers with disease vectors. He exposed US soldiers to the suspected vector of yellow fever - mosquito bites - in controlled studies, where some soldiers where kept in screened barracks and some had open windows. These included his second in command, who (among others) died during the studies.
Walter Reed, his coworkers, and others in the early days of scientific medicine (such as Ehrlich, the discoverer of cures for both diptheria and syphilis) had courage so deep and convictions so strong that I feel like a very small flea on a very big dog whenever I read about them.
I recall a proposal to put niacin in booze to help the health of those who make alcohol their primary source of calories. As I recall, it never went anywhere due to moral outrage that some winos might not get so ill or die so soon.
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