The Treatment: The Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests - Hardcover

Stephens, Martha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822328119 ISBN 13: 9780822328117

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2002

Synopsis

The Treatment is the story of one tragedy of medical research that stretched over eleven years and affected the lives of hundreds of people in an Ohio city. Thirty years ago the author, then an assistant professor of English, acquired a large set of little-known medical papers at her university. These documents told a grotesque story. Cancer patients coming to the public hospital on her campus were being swept into secret experiments for the U.S. military; they were being irradiated over their whole bodies as if they were soldiers in nuclear war. Of the ninety women and men exposed to this treatment, twenty-one died within a month of their radiations.
Martha Stephens’s report on these deaths led to the halting of the tests, but local papers did not print her charges, and for many years people in Cincinnati had no way of knowing that lethal experiments had taken place there. In 1994 other military tests were brought to light, and a yellowed copy of Stephens’s original report was delivered to a television newsroom. In Ohio, major publicity ensued—at long last—and reached around the world. Stephens uncovered the names of the victims, and a legal action was filed against thirteen researchers and their institutions. A federal judge compared the deeds of the doctors to the medical crimes of the Nazis during World War II and refused to dismiss the researchers from the suit. After many bitter disputes in court, they agreed to settle the case with the families of those they had afflicted. In 1999 a memorial plaque was raised in a yard of the hospital.
Who were these doctors and why had they done as they did? Who were the people whose lives they took? Who was the reporter who could not forget the story, the young attorney who first developed the case, the judge who issued the historic ruling against the doctors? This is Stephens’s moving account of all that transpired in these lives and her own during this epic battle between medicine and human rights.

About this title

About the Author

Martha Stephens was for many years Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of The Question of Flannery O’Connor, the novels Cast a Wistful Eye and Children of the World. An activist for many years, Stephens was the first to break the story of this scandalous project and continues to work for justice for the victims and their families.

From the Back Cover

"Stephens tells her story in a clear and sure voice, forging a compelling narrative that presents this tragedy in a very human and accessible manner."--George Annas, author of "Standard of Care: The Law of American Bioethics"

Reviews

In a research project that has come to exemplify radiation experiments in humans during the Cold War, physicians at the University of Cincinnati, led by Eugene Saenger and under contract from the Department of Defense, conducted total-body or partial-body radiation in 88 patients with cancer between 1960 and 1972. Although many particulars are disputed, the consensus is that without funding from the Department of Defense, Saenger would not have undertaken the research, that the Department of Defense was eager to learn more about the physiological effects of high levels of radiation in order to protect military forces against it, that the patients themselves had metastatic cancer but were ambulatory (and many of them were still working), and that such an intervention had been well tested to determine its therapeutic potential and had been found to be ineffective. Why, then, was Saenger conducting the research? What were patients told? Was the research unethical by the standards of the time? Should Cincinnati take its place along with Tuskegee and Willowbrook in the roll of dishonor in the history of experimentation involving humans? These questions have not been unexplored. Three committees, one external and two internal to the University of Cincinnati, examined them in the early 1970s. The 1973 hearings led by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) on the ethics of human experimentation -- which led to the establishment of regulations for institutional review boards -- also raised such questions. The Final Report of the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, issued in 1995, devoted an entire chapter to experiments in total-body irradiation, with most of it focused on the Cincinnati research. Finally, a suit in federal court, presided over by Judge Sandra Beckwith, addressed the major points under dispute. Given all this attention, a book devoted to this episode is warranted. Judge Beckwith herself found the Cincinnati case to be "a singular case in terms of having public interest," and the amount of surviving documentation, including extensive patient records, certainly justifies further analysis. Martha Stephens has many credentials that are relevant to this assignment. She was among the first faculty members at the university to become concerned about the research; she had access to some of the most important records; and she moved energetically and persistently to bring the events to public attention. Although she is not a scientist or an expert in radiation -- she is a professor of English, now retired -- the medical and scientific facts are within her grasp. Her book describes the difficulty of capturing the attention of the press, the resistance of the university to pressure from junior faculty members, the inadequacy of the ostensible process of consent for the human subjects, the long and frustrating class-action lawsuit, and most moving of all, the ways in which the research affected the lives of the subjects and their families. On the whole, however, The Treatment is a disappointing effort, failing to structure a coherent account of the events or to offer original insights into the dynamics behind them. Stephens keeps her focus very narrow, and her narrative is part autobiography, part expose, and part a settling of scores. We learn which local reporters were the first to pick up the story and which were not, but apart from the bestowal of individual compliments, no larger themes emerge. There are some heavy-handed comments about newspaper chains and about an absence of "news from the point of view of common people seeking to resist the assault on their incomes and way of life," but Stephens does not give us overarching insights into the crucial role of the press and its strengths and weaknesses in moving an expose forward. Nor does she successfully anchor the events in the history of human experimentation. She mentions, of course, Nuremberg and Tuskegee and recapitulates an article or two by well-known scholars, but she gives us little understanding of where Cincinnati fits into this grim tradition. She does supply details on the class-action proceedings but offers no overview of the advantages and disadvantages of using courts to these ends. Even more telling, Stephens does not attempt to penetrate the mindset of the investigators -- not that such knowledge would bring forgiveness, but it might enable us to understand why they did what they did and how we might prevent such practices in the future. She is apparently too angry to carry out such an exercise and is more determined to ponder whether "there is a deep grain of wrongfulness in some human creatures." When she reviews "the mysterious horror of what had taken place," she concludes, "I almost do believe in human depravity without explanation." In this spirit, Stephens is more eager to tell us that the patients were not at death's door than to help us think about the meaning that cancer and terminal illness have for physicians' clinical practices and research ethics. She notes but does not emphasize enough the fact -- fully documented in the report of the President's Advisory Committee -- that in the 1970s, total-body irradiation was already well outside the boundary of acceptable medical practice and the even more damning fact that patients were not given antiemetic drugs to alleviate the painful effects of the radiation (for fear that such a practice would reduce the value of the findings for the Department of Defense). Readers who want to grasp quickly the essentials of the Cincinnati research should consult the Advisory Committee's report. Those who want a more discursive account of what it takes to correct medical and governmental malfeasance should read Stephens's book. In either case, they will come to appreciate the plaque that was put up, as Stephens tells us, in an out-of-the-way spot behind the hospital. A result of the court settlement, it reads, in part: "The Cincinnati citizens listed below were the innocent victims of human radiation experiments in this hospital from 1960 to 1972. Their names are placed here so that all may remember their injuries and afflictions, and their unwitting sacrifice in a project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and carried out by professors in the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine." David J. Rothman, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2002 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

From 1960 to 1972, a grisly and highly suspect research project was carried out in the bowels of Cincinnati General Hospital. Cancer patients, most of them in advanced stages of the disease, were exposed to massive quantities of radiation over long and continuous periods of time. Nearly all of them (over 100 altogether) died within weeks or months of the start of the irradiation "therapy." In 1971 Stephens, a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, began to make inquiries about the Cincinnati project; despite the hospital authorities' reluctance, she eventually gained access to files documenting the treatments. They were, she says, horrifying records of misery, incompetence and medical hubris, and Stephens dedicated the next 30 years to publicizing them. Unfortunately, the story she relates here is less concerned with the patients than with herself: only about 70 pages are actually dedicated to a description and analysis of the experiments, while the rest of the book is a detailed, boring and highly self-serving account of the author's experiences with the press and the courts. While there appears to be little doubt that the Cincinnati project was a grotesque abuse of medical ethics and simple human decency, Stephens seems positively to revel in it as proof of the racism (most of the patients were black) and mendacity of the medical and political establishment. And while her dedication in bringing the case to light is admirable, her presentation of the parties involved ("She had believed the doctors, had automatically believed the doctors. I didn't feel she cared about common people but only about important people.") is as tendentious as it is simplistic. B&w photos.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From 1960 through 1971, more than 80 cancer patients were treated with partial or total body radiation at Cincinnati General Hospital as part of an experiment conducted on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense. A number of the patients died a short time after the radiation exposure, which was administered in an attempt to simulate the possible effects of nuclear war on soldiers. While the experiments were kept relatively quiet until 1994, the project raised serious issues relating to informed consent, the appropriateness of the treatment, and the intent of the research. These concerns eventually led to extensive investigations, a congressional hearing, and a lengthy lawsuit. A novelist and former professor of English, Stephens (Children of the World) is active in many social causes and was a member of a junior faculty organization that first attempted to raise awareness of this project in the 1970s. Based on hospital records, interviews with the victims' families, government reports, and University of Cincinnati disclosures, the book provides a shocking example of why we must remain diligent in our review of medical research. Recommended for all collections. Tina Neville, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822328119
• ISBN 13: 9780822328117
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 376