Dangerous Medicine

Sydney A. Halpern is professor emerita at University of Illinois at Chicago, and lecturer in the Program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University.

“Halpern’s story is chilling, told with clarity and commendable brevity and, most importantly, is of crucial relevance today. The emergence of Covid-19 galvanised calls for the creation of experiments in which volunteers would be infected with SARS-CoV-2 to help understand how the disease spreads and behaves. Some of these studies continue.”—Robin McKie, The ObserverWinner of the 2024 George Rosen Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine“Sydney Halpern has written a compelling, if unsettling, history of hepatitis research during World War II and the Cold War. It will become a must-read for anyone interested in bioethics and medical history.”—Susan E. Lederer, author of Subjected to Science and Flesh and Blood“An immensely important account of decades of human experiments that raised serious moral questions, not only in hindsight as is often claimed, but also at the time they were conducted.”—Jonathan D. Moreno, coauthor of Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die: Bioethics and the Transformation of Healthcare in America“Sydney Halpern’s Dangerous Medicine, a scandal-strewn history of hepatitis research, provides a frighteningly timely reminder of the dangers vulnerable patients face when medical research attacks disease in time of war.”—Paul A. Lombardo, author of Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell