Dear Stan,Many thanks for the latest posting. I forgot to mention that Lord Moran was Winston Churchill's personal doctor for many years. Talk about having friends in high places. Obviously you don't get such a job and hold it for decades unless you are more of a politician than a physician. So the chances of him or any of his medical pals facing embarassing questions about British and American medical experiments were less than zero.
Lord Moran of course kept a diary of his time with Churchill and made a further truckload of money by publishing it. He clearly heeded the wise advise of Mae West: "Keep a diary, honey, and one day it will keep you". Obviously the old fashioned notions about patient confidentiality don't apply at that level.
And if you have no qualms about medical experimentation on the helpless or coerced, are you going to have any greater qualms about abortion or euthanasia? The wholesale corruption of the medical profession was not something which suddenly fell from the sky onto a few nasty German doctors in the 1930s. Plainly the ethical rot started decades before throughout the Western world.
Here is the link to a highly revealing review of H M Pappworth's groundbreaking book "Human Guinea Pigs."Pappworth had the courage to make himself very unpopular with his medical peers, who obviously resented public exposure of their practices. Scariest of all in this review was the description of experiments at a New York hospital, with patients being threatened with having their legs plunged into freezing water. This was powerfully reminiscent of the unforgettable scene in "Downfall" where an SS doctor kills himself and his whole family as the Russians close in on Berlin in 1945. Not surprising; the doctor in question was responsible for freezing Russian prisoners of war to death in tanks of icy water, so his chances of survival in Russian captivity were just about nil.
My acid tongued friend at church (who thinks Moran and Co should have been in the dock and on the gallows at Nuremburg) tells me that "Human Guinea Pigs" may be about to be republished by an American medical charity. It is available on Amazon.com and Ebay through second hand book sellers. The really interesting read would, of course, be a fully updated edition, as Pappworth's book is 40 years out of date.
The most recent scandal I am aware of was the 2006 fiasco in London were 6 healthy young men were nearly killed by trials of a new drug TGN1412. They survived (just) by grace of some incredibly skilled treatment by doctors who were plainly making it up as they went along - no one anywhere in the world had ever treated such bizarre effects before (at least, none which have been widely publicized). But the last I heard was that their health is permanently compromised and they may well be prone to early development of cancer and other horrors. See link: Human medical experiments go terribly wrong in "nightmare" TGN1412 drug trial
