大象传媒

Criminal Psychologist Dr Julia Shaw investigates the threads connecting modern medicine to its often brutal origins.

The history of medicine is contaminated with profoundly unethical experiments, driven by doctors who saw "opportunities" that led them to exploit gullible, vulnerable, or desperate people.

Dr Julia Shaw

Some of these experiments have laid the foundations for entire fields of medicine, establishing procedures and medications that have saved countless lives. Others were vanity projects, causing immense human suffering with no real scientific value.

Together with Dr. Adam Rutherford, I have been working over the past few months to uncover the true stories of the research subjects who defined medicine, and the ethically dubious scientists who experimented on them.

In our new 大象传媒 Radio 4 series, The Human Subject, we tell the stories of the most important medical experiments that you’ve never heard of. As a criminal psychologist, I want to understand the minds of those who engaged in these unethical procedures. Meanwhile, my co-host, geneticist Dr Adam Rutherford, dissects their medical foundations and murky methods.

Rather than writing these stories from the perspective of the perpetrators, whose names are still celebrated in medical textbooks, we retell history from the viewpoint of the people who were tricked, forced, or coerced into shady experiments. It’s about time that history is told through the eyes of the human subjects.

Here are three of the cases we uncovered, involving research subjects who made medical history but never received the credit they deserved.

How do we know that sugar causes cavities? This now-common knowledge originated from a chilling experiment conducted in a Swedish asylum. Vipeholm Asylum housed about 1,000 individuals with extremely low IQs, most of whom were nonverbal. Some were children.

The subjects were given sugary drinks and sticky toffee to study the effects on their teeth. Dr. Rutherford spoke to Elin Bommenel, the first researcher to access the original Vipeholm archive, hidden away in an old hospital attic. She explained that "the hope was that they would eat them slowly but surely over the days so that they would get the sticky toffee stuck in between their teeth from the morning till the evening."

The result was a gruesome reality of cavities, tooth infections, and horrific pain. Many had to have almost all of their teeth pulled. Yet the experiments continued for years.

The Enslaved Women Who Birthed Gynaecology

Why does the field of gynaecology exist? In the mid-1800s, an enslaved girl named Anarcha gave birth and was left with severe injuries. The doctor called to help her, Dr. Marion Sims, documented the problems and began searching for a cure. This set him on the path to becoming known as the ‘father of gynaecology.’ Obstetricians and gynaecologists today still regularly use a tool called the Sims Speculum.

But his contribution to medicine is only half of the story. Sims chose almost exclusively Black enslaved women as his research subjects. I spoke with Dr. Deirdre Cooper-Owens, author of "Medical Bondage," who explained the historical context. In the mid-19th century, restoring gynaecological health was more than a compassionate gesture; "black women's wombs are the linchpin of slavery."

When Dr. Sims studied the condition, Anarcha, who was 17 when Sims first operated on her, endured approximately 30 surgeries without anesthesia. Others, including two women recorded in the records as Betsy and Lucy, also underwent years of painful procedures. The stories of these ‘mothers of gynaecology’ have only just emerged from the dark depths of history.

Does mind control exist? From the 1950s to the 1960s, the CIA conducted a series of secret experiments under the codename MK-ULTRA. Their goal was to find a way to control the mind.

One of the psychiatrists involved in this secret project in Canada, Dr. Ewen Cameron, believed that the key was reverting the brain to its original state using a combination of hard drugs, excessive electroshocks, and induced comas. Then, he believed, he could rebuild the mind as he liked.

I spoke with Lana Ponting, one of the last surviving research subjects from these mind control experiments. She described how, in 1958, she was taken by her parents to the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, where the studies were being conducted. She was 16. The doctors tried to reset her mind but instead caused severe damage to her brain. The experiments were so absurd and extreme, that, as Lana told me, “We are dealing with something that is like being in a movie, but it isn't a movie. It's real.”

Despite their unethical research efforts and the severe brain trauma inflicted on human subjects like Lana Ponting, mind control remains a myth.

These are just a few of the outrageous crimes in medical history that we explore. We trace back the real archives, dig into the original research papers, and – most importantly – meet the people behind the breakthroughs. The series will have you wondering how on earth every one of these cases isn’t widely known. And, it will have you rethinking your toothbrush, reproductive health, and the innermost workings of your mind... and that’s just the beginning.