Medical Experiments on Prisoners and the Mentally Ill

The Brandt reading on The Case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study shows a terrifying  example of how structural violence (in this case, racism) can lead to “ethically unjustified” experimental research on societies most vulnerable citizens. One such population of vulnerable citizens is mentally ill patients and prisoners in the United States. Although shocking, it was once seen as fine to experiment on mentally ill persons and prisoners. In fact, many life saving vaccines were created using mentally ill patients and prisoners as subjects. For example, Dr. Jonas Salk, famous for inventing the polio vaccine, injected experimental flu vaccine in male patients at an Michigan insane asylum. In 1942, a federally funded study exposed men to hepatitis in a series of experiments, including patients from a mental institution in Connecticut. Dr. Paul Havens, the primary researcher in this experiment, was one of the first scientists to differentiate types of hepatitis and their causes. These studies, along with dozens of others indicates that prisoners and mentally ill persons have long been victimized for the sake of science. Unfortunately, these vulnerable populations are often unable to consent or even object to such experiments. It is only now, in the 20th century, that we recognize such experimental research on vulnerable populations as unethical.