Against Their Will, by Allen M. Hornblum – review

After the Morecambe Bay Hospital scandal a new era opens of compassion, -whistle-blowing, naming names and possible prosecutions. But what about 70-odd years of harming children in ‘care’ homes, and prisoners, with toxin injections, -radioactive blasts, electro-shocks to the brain and frontal lobotomies — all done in the interests of medical advance by leading American doctors and scientists, one of whom was -awarded a Nobel Prize?

Furthermore, what if the CIA sponsored such work in the interest of defending the US against Soviet threats? We condemned Nazi scientists like Josef Mengele for doing such things, resulting in the 1947 Nuremberg Protocol forbidding experiments and treatments employing ‘force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching or any ulterior form of constraint or coercion’ — a document, this invaluable book states, which most medical students and doctors have never seen.

Against Their Will is not about sadists, Nazis or crazies. In part, it’s about men like Jonas Salk, revered for developing the anti-polio vaccine that saved the lives of millions of children — after injecting the polio virus into ‘imbeciles’ to test whether his new anti-virals worked. Or the Portuguese Nobel prizewinner Egas Moniz, who created ‘a scalpel-like metal instrument in the shape of an apple corer and instructed his colleague to cut into the brains of nearly two dozen anxiety-ridden and insane patients’.

In the late 1940s an enterprising American neurologist ‘performed hundreds of prefrontal lobotomies on a vast array of patients, including 11 individuals whose schizophrenia developed before the age of ten’. After Moniz received the Nobel, 20,000 Americans, including children diagnosed with phobias, manic depression and -schizophrenia, underwent lobotomies. These operations took hours until the American neurologist developed a seven-minute procedure for entering the brain through the eye ‘with an ice-pick-like instrument’. There may be Spectator readers old enough to remember such practices here.