Stangers at the Bedside

I found Strangers at the Bedside to be very shocking and engaging. The section on Beecher’s article and all the human experiments done by clinical researchers was especially startling, particularly because of how recently they were done, particularly after WWII and all horror of the Nazi experiments was known. I was also kind of surprised by how cavalier researchers treated human experimentation. For example, in 1866 when J. H. Salisbury wanted to test swamps vapors as the cause of malaria, he filled tins with dying prairie bog and then placed the tins under the window of the bedroom of some men to see if they became sick. When the men become sick, Salisbury just notes that he had to stop the experiment because of “the difficulty of obtaining the consent of parties for examination.” It seems like the experimenters just took human experimentation so lightly. I can also see why this became more of a concern when the researchers were strangers. With Salisbury, it seems that the men knew who he was and told him to stop, but with the Beecher examples, the clinical researchers were testing people they did not know and who could not object. Also, today it is obvious that doctors are responsible so much more than just the individual patient, but I did realize how relatively quickly this transformation happened.