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  • For the Good of Mankind?: The Shameful History of Human Medical Experimentation by Vicki Oransky Wittenstein
  • Elizabeth Bush
Wittenstein, Vicki Oransky For the Good of Mankind?: The Shameful History of Human Medical Experimentation. Twenty-First Century, 2013 96p Library ed. ISBN 978-1-4677-0659-9 $35.93 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4677-1661-1 $26.95 Ad Gr. 6-10

In the shadow of groundbreaking medical advancements are often harrowing tales of human subjects used in experimentation. Here Wittenstein offers a brief history [End Page 188] of this underworld of medical science and introduces past and contemporary efforts to balance the search for effective treatments with appropriate safeguards for the persons who test them. She opens with historical background on the development of the Hippocratic Oath and casual attitudes toward use of vulnerable populations for experimentation. Chapters Two and Three focus on the period around World War II, in Germany and in the United States, covering the medical atrocities conducted by Nazi doctors and the secret radiation experiments conducted on the homefront on human subjects. Chapter Four treats backlash from outrage following public exposes of unethical experimentation, and the formulation of the Common Rule that currently governs human experimentation in the U.S.; the concluding chapter focuses on current challenges surrounding for-profit pharmaceutical companies, conflict of interest, clinical trials, outsourcing trials to developing countries, and biospecimen ownership and research. The topic is timely and provocative, but the anecdotes are too often shallowly reported, creating more questions than answers, (e.g., how did eye injections come to be studied for tuberculosis treatment?), or they are inadequately sourced (such as the unauthorized use of blood samples from the Havasupai tribe). If used as a starting point for research, however, this title could be a valuable resource, particularly for students in the process of narrowing a topic within the broader issue. Source notes, a selected bibliography, lists for further reading, an index, discussion questions, and an array of black and white illustrations are included.

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