ficacy of
certain drugs, so long as this is not absolutely for the good of the
individual child treated rather than for children in general, is
abhorrent to the most of us. To cause a helpless baby one hour's
distress, to say nothing of suffering, for the sake even of other
children, when that baby has been brought to the hospital by its
parents or guardians solely for what may be done for its benefit, we
hold to be a breach of trust on the part of hospital authorities and
physicians that hasn't the slightest defence either in morals or in
law.

"We write these words not because we believe that any physician is so
far fallen below the lowest levels of our common humanity as to inject
into a defenceless child the active germs of a loathsome or possibly
fatal disease, but because our moral sense is outraged at any
treatment of the child such as we should refuse to permit were the
child our own. We believe he universal assertial of parents would be
that, if having taken their child to a hospital for tratment, they
learned that it had beenused for experimentation, though no lasting
harm could come to it from the experiment, someone would pay the
penalty for the unwarranted deed, if money or influence or, these
failing, muscle, could reach far enough to find the offender."

Does such condemnation of experimentation upon the hospital patient or
children tend to block scientific advance? Not at all. A recent
writer tells us that "once it is evident that man himself must be the
experimental animal, the scientist volunteer is always ready." If this
be so, why should not the human "material" be acquired always in a way
to which the charge of unjust procedure would never be applicable? If
assurance could have been given that the luetin test implied no risk
of any kind, might not the Rockefeller Institute have secured any
number of volunteers by the offer of a gratuity of twenty or thirty
dollars as a compensation for any discomfort that might be endured? Of
the thousands of medical students in the State of New York, are there
not hundreds who would have offered with eagerness to submit to a test
devoid of peril, in the interests of scientific research? And even if
an experiment implied danger, might there not be sufficient
compensation for all risks? Every year firemen lose their lives in the
flames, and policemen are murdered. The compensation they receive
induces them to incur risks that might not otherwise be assumed. A