Dangerous Medicine: The Story behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis, Sydney A. Halpern

Abstract

Sydney Halpern’s book Dangerous Medicine tells the American story of hepatitis research with human subjects from 1940 through 1974. The book is an expression of moral outrage at researchers’ discriminatory decisions about whom to use in human experiments and policy elites’ complicity with the research — as well as their convenient spins on the studies, which they fed to a fawning media. The book is interested in the failure of moral imagination by elite researchers and government funders around long-term disability from research. Halpern situates the book in the historiography of “research abuse narratives,” and charges that histories to date are flawed because “they obscure the web of institutional and cultural supports that gave momentum to the now-condemned research” (p. 179). In three sections of three chapters each, enriched by four oral histories, the book tracks stakeholders’ “normalizing narratives,” which I understand to be justifications of research agendas and practices that aimed to neutralize criticisms and fears.