In July 1946, 20-year-old Helen Hutchison entered the Vanderbilt University maternity clinic in Nashville, Tennessee. Helen found herself pregnant after her husband returned from the war in World War II. However, the pregnancy was not easy. During her visit to the clinic, Helen’s doctor gave her a small drink.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“A little cocktail,” replied his doctor. “It will make you feel better.”
“I don’t know if I should have a cocktail,” he replied jokingly.
“Drink it all. Drink it down” (quoted in Welsome 1999, p. 220).Helen did as her doctor ordered.
Three months later Helen’s daughter, Barbara, was born. Soon after, Helen began to have terrible health problems; his face was swollen, and his hair fell out. She then suffered two miscarriages, one of which required 16 blood transfusions (Welsome 1999, p. 220). Baby Barbara faced her own health problems from childhood. She suffered from extreme fatigue and developed an autoimmune disease and eventually skin cancer.
…Unbeknownst to Helen, she and her unborn baby were subjects in a government-sponsored study. She was one of hundreds of women who received an experimental “cocktail” between 1945 and 1947 during their prenatal visits, recommendations of the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which provided the materials (Wittenstein 2014, p. 39).
The 829 women at the Vanderbilt clinic were just a few of the thousands of people, mostly American citizens, who would be subjected to illegal experiments and human rights abuses in the post-World War II era at the hands of scientists funded and supplied by the US government. This test was intended to provide the government with information about the effects of atomic weapons on the human body to improve military capabilities in the name of “national security.”
This paper deals with the issue of the US government’s activities related to the screening of people after World War II.
That’s Coyne and Hall writing about Dr. Mengele, USA Style: Studies of Human Rights Abuses in Post-World War II America. Interestingly, this immoral experiment using radiation and chemical warfare agents is less well known to the public than say the Tuskegee Study even though it involved a much larger population.
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