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

A revealing exposé on extreme radiation experiments performed on unknowing cancer patients during the 1960s which caused their deaths.

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.

Machine generated contents note: Preface xi -- Prologue xix -- PART ONE. THE STORY OF THE -- PRESS AND THE PUBLIC CAMPAIGN -- I. The First Public Knowledge of the Tests 3 -- 2. I994 and a Secret Drawer Reopened 5 -- 3. The Press in Full Flower 27 -- 4. African Americans Lost and Found 52 -- 5. The Back Files 83 -- 6. Testimonies I07 -- 7. Author's Intermezzo 131 -- PART TWO. THE MEDICAL STORY -- 8. The Mother Without a Name I53 -- 9. The Final Years 171 -- io. The Experiments Must Cease 202 -- PART THREE. THE LEGAL STORY -- II. A Civil Action 225 -- 12. An Angry Judge 244 -- 13. The Case Closed 262 -- Appendix i. Table of Cincinnati Radiations 293 -- Appendix 2. Hearing Testimony of Eugene Saenger 296 -- Notes 307 -- Sources 335 -- Index 343 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 I årene 1960-1971 blev en række mennesker behandlet med stråler på Cincinnati General Hospital uden at vide, at de deltog i et medicinsk eksperiment for den amerikanske hær. Bogen beskriver forfatterens forsøg på at få pressen til at skrive om sagen, ofrene for strålingen og retssagen, der fandt sted i sidste halvdel af 1990'erne One of greatest tragedys in modern medicine and the cold war is revealed in all its gruesome detail in this unflinching account of the U.S. military's shameful radiation tests against unwitting subjects.