HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION
In the House of Commons on 3rd August 1971, Mr. Maurice Edelman, MP, voiced the concern of Members of Parliament, members of the medical profession and the general public over the use of patients for experiments to test new drugs, vaccines and other experimental procedures.(1)Mr. Edelman explained the reasons for his concern in an article in the Sunday Mirror:(2)
"Among doctors themselves in Britain and the USA, there is a growing anxiety recently underlined by a distinguished consultant, Dr. M. H. Pappworth, about a situation in which, with or without proper consent, patients in public hospitals are used increasingly as human guinnea-pigs in experiments ranging from the use of cardiac catheters to the injection of specific diseases."
Anxiety about this situation had been growing for some years and the pubication of M. H. Pappworth's book, Human Guinnea-Pigs, raised a storm of public protest. Dr. Maurice Pappworth, a Hartley Street consultant physician, spent five years researching this book, which lists over 200 authenticated cases where research experiments had been carried out on patients.(3)
Hundreds of journals reviewed Dr. Pappworth's book and the comments ranged from the medical newspaper which sought to redeem the reputation of all concerned by writing of "the many lives saved by the struggles of doctors and scientists"(4) to The Times which took the view that Dr. Pappworth had been right to draw attention to this disquieting trend in medicine.(5)
In some cases, experiments on human patients may be related , however vaguely, to the disease from which the patients are suffering: new drugs, for instance are given their final evaluation in this way. If there is some real hope that the new treatment may help the patient and not do any harm, this practice may be justified provided the patient has given consent after receiving a careful explanation.
Sometimes, however, experiments are done on humans which are quite unrelated to the ilness from which the patient is suffering. For these there is no kind of justification whatsoever. Often, though by no means always, they are carried out on institutionalised mental patients.
Dr. Pappworth says in his book:
"During the last twenty years clinical medicine, especially in the teaching hospitals, has become dominated by research workers whose primary interest is the extension of medical knowledge. Their concern with patients as such, that is, as individual people who are sick, has tended to suffer as a result."
After quoting Sir William Heneage Ogilvie as saying that: "The science of experimental medicine is something new and sinister," he goes on:
"Articles by individual research workers and by leaders of research teams engaged in research reveal the frequency with which extremely unpleasant and often dangerous experiments are performed on unsuspecting patients. Most of those doctors who know that these things are common practice have felt powerless to stop them; whole the public, for its part, has remained unaware of what is going on."
There follows case histories of such experiments, giving full details of the procedures and the scientific journal which published the information.
An experiment at a London teaching hospital was performed on 66 patients suffering with liver disease, of whom 33 had been delirious and either comatose or stuperose before the experiment. Fourteen of these, who were obviously dying, are described as "during the last week of irreversible hepatic coma." They were subjected to the following procedures simultaneously; a large catheter was passed into the main arm vein, or into the main chest vein, into and through the heart and so into the principal vein draining the liver, enabling blood samples to be taken directly from the liver. With this catheter still in situ, another was passed through the main vein of the thigh, into the chief abdominal vein, and then into the kidney vein so that blood could be collected directly from the kidney. The patients were then given large doses of ammonium chloride which, in patients with liver disease, almost invariably produces profound neurological and psychological disturbances ranging from a mild delirium to acute mania with frightening hallucinations.
DID ALL THE PATIENTS REALLY GIVE FULL CONSENT, AFTER HONEST AND DETAILED EXPLANATIONS OF WHAT WAS TO BE METED OUT TO THEM? WERE THE COMPLICATIONS AND DANGERS EVEN MENTIONED?
HALF THE PATIENTS HAD MENTAL DISTURBANCE EVEN PRIOR TO THE EXPERIMENT DUE TO THEIR SEVERE LIVER DISEASE - HOW COULD THESE BE DEEMED LEGALLY TO HAVE GIVEN CONSENT?
In addition to the 66 patients with liver disease, 33 other patients were used as controls and were submitted to the same unpleasant procedures. These would be "patients with diseases other than the one under investigation, or hospital staff."
An experiment on 43 severe diabetics, including one aged 15, one aged 16 and one aged 70, was cited by Dr. Pappworth. Insulin was withheld for two days and then a catheter was passed through an arm vein, into the chest, through the heart and into the main liver vein. At the same time, liver punctures were performed on 20 of the diabetics.
An extensive trial of an experimental measles vaccine was conducted in England and for this purpose 56 mentally subnormal children were selected. The authors state: "They were especially suitable for the study since close medical supervision was possible throughout." Twenty-one other mental defectives were not vaccinated but were kept in close contact with the vaccinated group.
Forty-six of the vaccinated became feverish and 48 developed a rash. Twenty-one had a moderately severe and 9 had a very serious reaction to the vaccination. It is noted that "many of the vaccinated became miserable and fretful during the period of the rash and pyrexia." Five of the children developed tonsilitis as a consequence and one had a severe complicating broncho-pneumonia.
Dr. Pappworth refers to what he has described as "probably the worst experiment on children which I have ever seen published" carried out on hospitalised children suffering from the effects of rheumatic fever, including cardiac complications in 10 out of the 17 cases. They had catheters passed into their hearts and, with the catheter still in position, "these sick, frightened children" were made to pedal on a bicycle.
So the book goes on, giving case after case of severe and sometimes totally irrelevant experiments on humans done in hospitals in Britain and elsewhere. (Many of the experiments cited in Dr. Pappworth's book took place in the US, but in this leaflet only British experiments have been quoted.)
Accounts of experiments on humans are, understandably, rarely published, and where details do appear it is in journals of a specialist kind which the public never see. The ordinary newspapers like to pretend that they are the watchdog for the public, but perhaps it is too much trouble for them to keep an eye on the innumerable medical and scientific journals where, occasionally, obscured within the clouds of ink and technical jargon, such reports may be found. However, from time to time, details of such experiments do come to light.
In 1967, a teacher stated that while she was in a London hospital after having her first baby, doctors experimented on her without her permission. As a result of this, she had a sever haemorrhage, which continued for ten days. She alleged that the hospital admitted there had been an error of judgement. They told her that she "was in a research department and that they did not tell patients because they might get hysterical."(6)
The Northern Daily Mail reported that the Patients' Association had challenged a hospital management committee's right to subject so-called abandoned children to experimentation without consent.(7)
The Medical Research Council laid down basic rules in 1964 on whether doctors should experiment on patients. In August 1967, a committee of doctors, with the President of the Royal College of Physicians, Sir Max Rosenheim, in the Chair, recommended that committees be set up in British hospitals to authorise HUMAN GUINNEA-PIG experiments on patients. The recommendations, which were published in the British Medical Journal followed an 11-month inquiry by the 10 man committee.(8)
The cases chosen to illustrate this report relate to British experiments, but we do not forget that Dr. Pappworth and the press can give many examples of this method of research abroad. The Weekend Mail reported that at Willowbrook, Staten Island, New York, doctors had deliberately injected children with hepatitis, a disease of the liver. "I would have thought," wrote The Weekend Mail reporter, "the pathetic little mites were suffering enough of a handicap in life without being deliberately diseased in the name of so-called scientific research."(9)
For many years scientists have been saying: "We must experiment on animals because we can't (may not) experiment on human beings," but we anti-vivisectionists have always said that EXPERIMENTS ON ANIMALS LEAD INEVITABLY TO EXPERIMENTS ON PEOPLE. NO HOSPITAL PATIENT TODAY IS ABSOLUTELY SAFE FROM EXPERIMENTATION.
REFERENCES
Hansard, House of Commons Reports, 3rd August 1971.
Sunday Mirror, London, 1st August 1971.
Human Guinnea-Pigs, M. H. Pappworth (Rutledge & Kegan Paul) and original article, "Human Guinnea-Pigs: A Warning" - Twentieth Century Magazine, Autumn, 1962.
Medical News, London, 8th June 1967.
Times Literary Supplement, London, 8th June 1967.
The Times, London, 19th May, 1967.
Northern Daily Mail, Hartlepool, 8th August 1967.
Northern Dispatch, Darlington, 11th August 1967.
The Weekend Mail, London, 18th June 1968.
Published by
THE SCOTTISH SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF VIVISECTION
10 Queensferry Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4PGReprinted 1981
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