heir
care...."[1]

[1] Medical Times and Gazette, November 10, 1883.

"CRUEL AND USELESS EXPERIMENTS ON PATIENTS"--that was the judgment of
a medical journal of the day. Any stronger condemnation now is hardly
necessary.

What is the judgment of the reader upon investigations of this
character? Here we have a physician making use of the bodies of his
patients for the testing of poisonous drugs, apparently without the
slightest regard for the poor and ignorant fellow-beings who had
confidently placed themselves under his care. Can such
experimentation as this be termed anything but human vivisection? Once
we admit that patients in hospitals have no rights superior to
scientific demands, and there is hardly a limit to which such
experimentation may not be carried on the poor, the ignorant, the
feeble-minded and the defenceless.

III. Experiments involving the Eye

Recent experiments with tuberculin, made upon the eyes of children and
other patients in public institutions, seem in many cases to have been
carried to an extent not easily justified by ordinary ethical ideals.
It is impossible to quote all the cases of this phase of human
experimentation; but enough can be given to afford any reader the
opportunity of judging the morality of the practice.

The experiments in question had one or more of the following
characteristics, distinguishing them from ordinary medical treatment:

1. They were made indiscriminately upon large numbers of children or
adults, who were under treatment for various ailments.
2. They appear to have been purely experimental in character, and
without purpose of individual benefit.
3. They seem to have involved in some cases considerable discomfort or
pain and the risk of irreparable injury to the sight.
4. Dying children apparently were not exempt from experimentation.

A recent medical writer, defding the experiments, points out that the
tuberculin test could not convey the infection. The test, he says,

"depends on the principle that if a fluid in which tubercle bacilli
have grown, and which therefore contains the chemical products of
their growth is injected into an animal or person suffering from
tuberculosis, a transient increase of temperature occurs, and
constitutes the chief sign of a positive reaction.... Later it was
found that if the diluted tuberculin was placed on the surface of the
eye, there followed in tuberculous persons, a reddening or congestion
o