But Wait, There's More - Human Experimentation on Residential School Children

 

Ian Mosby, PhD, has written a history of biomedical experimentation on indigenous people in Canada during the second half of the 20th century.

A review of Mosby's work, "Canada's shameful history of nutrition research on residential school children," has been published by the US National Institutes of Health. This wasn't kid-diddling priests. This was the handiwork of the Department of Indian Affairs and a flagrant violation of the 1946 Nuremberg Code of Medical Ethics. Yeah, 1946, Nuremberg, get the connection?

Last year, Ian Mosby, a food historian and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph (Guelph, Ontario), revealed details of highly unethical nutrition experiments performed on Canadian Aboriginal children at six residential schools between 1942 and 1952 (2) – our own medical atrocities. The experiments were performed by the Department of Indian Affairs of Canada under the direction of two physicians: Dr Percy Moore, the Indian Affairs Branch Superintendent of Medical Services, and Dr Frederick Tisdall, a famed nutritionist, a former president of the Canadian Paediatric Society and one of three paediatricians at The Hospital for Sick Children (Toronto, Ontario) who developed Pablum infant cereal in the 1930s. In these experiments, parents were not informed, nor were consents obtained. Even as children died, the experiments continued. Even after the recommendations from the Nuremberg trial, these experiments continued.

In these experiments, control and treatment groups of mal-nourished children were denied adequate nutrition. In one experiment, the treatment group received supplements of riboflavin, thiamine and/or ascorbic acid supplements to determine whether these mitigated the problems – they did not. In another, children were given a flour mix containing added thiamine, riboflavin, niacin and bone meal. Rather than improving nutrition, the children became more anemic, likely contributing to more deaths and certainly impacting development. In these experiments, efforts were made to control as many factors as possible, even when they harmed the research subjects. For example, previously available dental care was denied in some settings because the researchers wanted to observe the state of dental caries and gingivitis with malnutrition.

How could we have let this happen? Why did we not know about this long before now? Why did these experiments not stop when the Nuremberg Code was put forward?

You can read or download Mosby's paper, Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952, here.  The prime minister of the day was William Lyon Mackenzie King.

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See also: "We were always hungry": Severe hunger at residential schools linked to current health issues of Indigenous peoples in Canada - 2017, University of Toronto, Dalla Lana School of Public Health.