Useful Bodies: Humans in the Service of Medical Science in the Twentieth Century (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Useful Bodies: Humans in the Service of Medical Science in the Twentieth Century Lainie Friedman Ross Useful Bodies: Humans in the Service of Medical Science in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Jordan Goodman, Anthony McElligott, and Lara Marks. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003. Pp. 240. $42. This collection of essays explores "the role of the state as actor, legitimator and provider" in medical experimentation (p. 1). The book provides case studies of research performed in the 1930s to the 1970s from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. It is a critical addition to the literature of human experimentation. Several cases examine British military research. One such study explores British military decision making regarding germ-warfare research. Brian Balmer walks the reader through the evolution of the research: from fluorescent open-air trials of simulants to the direct use of human subjects in a test that sought to measure clothing contamination of non-pathogenic organisms. He suggests, however, that even the research that did not involve human subjects directly involved the body politic, given that its aim was to safeguard the population from biological warfare attack. Glenn Mitchell explores one set of nuclear radiation experiments in the 1950s. In 2001, the British Ministry of Defense acknowledged that it had used Australian servicemen in nuclear testing in Australia in the 1950s. The Ministry described these soldiers as part of an "Indoctrinee Force." The actual purpose of the establishment of the Force is unclear, although it seems to have had a major public relations component. For Mitchell, this requires a shift in one's thinking about human experimentation: "The formation of a force of senior military officers with the objective of acquiring information about atomic blasts so that its members could pass on positive accounts demands a different way of thinking about human research subjects and human experimentation" (p. 136). Mitchell concludes that "[T]he answers to the real purposes of the Force are not found in the specifics of their work in the Australian desert; they are found in the broad political and social context in which the tests took place" (p. 155). [End Page 312] Three chapters address "dual purpose research." Margaret Humphreys explores malaria therapy as a treatment of neurosyphilis. Mark Boyd was a malariologist who was interested in studying the natural history of malaria. He intentionally infected neurosyphilitic patients with malaria because the fevers improved their symptoms. Although Boyd was not the attending physician, he often undermined his own data collection to protect the patients from the malaria that he himself had given to them. To establish an insectary of infected mosquitoes, Boyd needed to recruit patients with malaria who were willing to experience an additional fever without quinine treatment. Again, Boyd often provided quinine to these patients before their blood was collected because of his own anxiety at delaying their cure. The chapter, appropriately titled "Whose Body? Which Disease?" describes the conflicts between his goals and roles. Gilbert Whittemore and Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald describe the opportunity to combine the wars against cancer and communism, despite the conflicting goals of Dr. William Sweet, a neurosurgeon, and his sponsors, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Sweet was interested in whether uranium would concentrate in brain tumors and therefore make treatment possible; the AEC wanted to measure the distribution of uranium in the body, in order to develop industrial health standards. Although Sweet wanted to administer large amounts of uranium in a single dose, the AEC was more interested in the effects of smaller doses over a longer period of time. Sweet chose terminal brain cancer patients to minimize harm; the AEC supported this selection because they wanted autopsy data. A hastily designed project was implemented without adequate study in animals and without strict subject selection and protections. David Jones and Robert Martensen describe the human radiation experiments and the formation of medical physics at the University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley, between 1937 and 1962. Jones and Martensen analyze the power and interest relationships of the early medical physics researchers and sponsors in their "pursuit of the dual goals of establishing a new professional discipline and achieving pre-eminence in medical physics" (p...