Real Experiments

Sanctioned Treatment In a sense, alienists experimented on the insane all the time. Moral therapy–the kindest treatment up to that moment–was a huge experiment on the part of entire nations. Some individual asylum superintendents tried various methods of controlling or helping patients, from restraining them or not restraining them, moving them to nicer wards based on behavior, and trying out a number of medicines and tonics to help patients physically. Some of these experiments were bizarre, hurtful, and sometimes, helpful.

However, some experiments were simply cruel. In the 1940s, Dr. W. Paul Havens exposed mental patients in Connecticut to hepatitis as part of a series of experiments. In 1942, doctors experimented with flu vaccines on mental patients in Michigan.

In Nazi Germany, experimentation on the helpless flourished. When they needed to find a better way to kill prisoners than by shooting them, Nazis experimented first with explosives. They locked mental patients in bunkers outside Minsk and blew them up, but found the method time-consuming and inefficient. They then experimented with a poison gas on mental patients in Mogilev, which proved to be a superior method. Beginning in 1934, Nazis sterilized people they thought shouldn’t have children, including the insane, but eventually just killed them as citizens unworthy of living. The U.S. sterilized women in mental hospitals as well, long before Nazis did. Indiana passed the country’s first sterilization law in 1907.