Quotes from Allen M. Hornblum

week old infants, ward-bound juveniles with epilepsy, or those with profound retardation in his experiments. Involuntary, nontherapeutic, and dangerous experiments on children were far from unusual or dishonourable endeavours during the twentieth century. The practice was widely accepted, rarely questioned and integral to the phenomenal growth of medical research and human experimentation during World War II and the Cold War that followed.

Institutionalised children, like other vulnerable populations including prisoners, soldiers, hospital patients and those with mental illness, we re an attractive wellspring of opportunity for enterprising doctors and scientists.

The message of Microbe Hunters was clear: Great men like Pasteur, Reed, Theobald Smith, and Paul Ehrlich were a rare breed. But for all their skill, training, and dogged pursuit of that deadly microbe or magical elixir, their mission was infinitely complex, the challenges multifaceted, and the trail of disease and death a daily occurrence.

It should be understood that doctors did not want to damage their patients—as a profession they were sworn to do no harm—but if they committed dastardly acts, they were more easily pardoned if something positive had come of the exercise. Experiments on humans were usually excused if the results of the study were substantial, the process had an element of science to it, and the physicians were correct in their expectations. 19

Even infants were used in research studies; for example, two-day-old babies were fed bismuth, a metal-like substance used in the manufacture of some pharmaceuticals, and then exposed to extensive X-rays to chart the course of different foods in their stomachs.

three associates of the William Pepper Clinical Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania used well over a hundred children under the age of eight at the St. Vincent's Home for Orphans, a Catholic orphanage in Philadelphia, for a series of diagnostic tests in which a tuberculin formula was placed in the test subjects' eyes. 23

Doctors quickly discovered that access to institutionalized populations could springboard them to lucrative contracts with drug companies and great wealth. The financial incentives became so enticing that some physicians gave up their private practices to conduct large-scale clinical trials full time. 10

The use of vulnerable institutionalized children for exploratory procedures, investigative treatments, and experimental preventives was common in the 1920s.

institutionalized children would be viewed as increasingly expendable and much sought after as test subjects. World War II and the Cold War that followed further fostered a need for test subjects. Research "volunteers" and institutions holding physically and mentally challenged children became particularly attractive for their convenience, isolation, and affordability. Many researchers viewed such facilities as a gift, a gift that kept on giving.

The demonizing and devaluing of certain segments of the population during the last two decades of the nineteenth century would grow in both support and legitimacy.

Many test subjects at the dawn of the Atomic Age and throughout the decades that followed, as the public would come to learn, were children. Some were only days old; some were cognitively and physically impaired.

Bereft of legal status or protectors, institutionalized children were often the test subjects of choice for medical researchers hoping to discover a new vaccine, prove a new theory, or publish an article in a respected medical journal.