I don’t think it too spoiler-y to tell you that Scorsese’s atmosphere-drenched “Shutter Island,” set as it is in a fictional 1950s mental institution staffed and populated by more than a few WWII vets, features several conversations about Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners. I’m sure you’ve heard about these atrocities – high altitude endurance tests, malarial infection research, sterilization projects, poisoned bullet experiments, etc. If you haven’t, turn on the History channel for two hours and you’ll hear about all of it, plus the Spear of Destiny and a computer simulated hypothetical melee fight between Hitler and a velociraptor.

Japan’s less notorious Unit 731, a black ops Imperial Army unit that, from 1937 to 1945, carried out horrific chemical and biological tests on Chinese and Korean prisoners, can offer an equally horrifying research project, if that’s the kind of thing that floats your pickle. What I want to do, though, is take a whirlwind tour of the creepy, grotesque, weird or otherwise cringe-worthy human medical experimentation that has occurred right here on American asphalt.

Due to the graphic nature of some of the experiments mentioned, we are putting the rest of this puppy AFTER THE JUMP…

During the early 19th century, when American medicine was still a loosely regulated syringe-scattered ethical free-for-all, respected medical professionals subjected prisoners, orphans and slaves to all manner of ickiness. J. Marion Sims, for example, who’s known today as the father of gynecology, was known yesterday as the high prince of vaginal hack-and-slash experiments as performed on enslaved African women sans anesthesia. Many of the ladies, some of whom underwent more than two dozen surgical crotch scrambles, died of infection while Sims used cobbling tools to reconfigure their babies’ skull bones (Sims believed trismus, a disorder that prevents infants from properly opening their mouths, could be cured through skull rearrangement). And if you think disenfranchised girlie bits had it bad in the 1800s, wait until you hear about what happened to disenfranchised manly parts in the 1900s…

For 33 years, Dr. Leo Stanley, San Quentin Prison’s chief of surgery, went testicle crazy. Those unfortunate enough to find themselves castrated by Dr. Stanley’s Knives of Sweet Baby Jesus You’ve Got To Be F***ing Kidding had their extracted pride replaced by one of two (well, really two of four) things: the verile cojones of a goat, ram or boar, or the retired balls of an executed prisoner. See, Dr. Stanley thought that the criminal instinct nested in a man’s marble bag, and could be nullified if the marbles in question were replaced by those of a corpse. Dead people nards in live people sacks. He also thought livestock nuts could cure age-related impotence. (They can’t.)

The 1900s saw the continuation of the convict and kiddie medical experimentation trend, as viral and bacterial agents like cholera, plague, beriberi and syphilis were shot into vein after unwilling vein, often just so doctors could observe the full course of an infection in multiple patients in a controlled setting. And when purposely infecting folks began to fall out of vogue, doctors settled for simply not curing the already infected. Such was the basis of the Tuskegee experiment, a 30-year study of syphilis carried out between 1942 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service, who went to rural Alabama, singled out 400 destitute syphilitic African American men and pretended to treat them, all the while observing the unknowing subjects’ gradual physical and mental decline. Under the stoic gaze of government scientists, 128 men died of syphilis or related conditions, 40 women became infected via sexual transmission and 19 children were born with the disease. The secret study only ended because the press found out and had a month’s worth of field days.

Coming up on Wednesday and Friday: Deadly Radiation, CIA Acid Casualties, Nuremberg Defense Lawyers and “the Effect of Frigid Temperatures on Mental Disorders”

Twitter this