Unnatural Resources: The Colonial Logic of the Holmesburg Prison Experiments
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- 1 Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA. [email protected].
- PMID: 32789794
- DOI: 10.1007/s10912-020-09651-5
This article focuses on medical trials performed by Dr. Albert Kligman on the inmates of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison between 1951 and 1974, which have been widely criticized as exploitative. I seek to investigate the mechanics behind the "ethical blind spot" that enabled the American medical community to laud Kligman for his efforts while simultaneously condemning the medical atrocities of the Holocaust and supporting the development of the Nuremberg Code. I argue that this nonrecognition hinges on a colonial logic by which certain populations are produced as waste, both rhetorically and materially. Drawing on the incarcerated men's accounts included in Allen Hornblum's books on the subject, I trace the process by which human beings come to be reclassified as natural resources and their exploitation recast as industrious cultivation.
Keywords: Bioethics; Colonialism; Dermatology; Human medical trials; Incarcerated populations.
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Unnatural Resources: The Colonial Logic of the Holmesburg Prison Experiments
- Published: 13 August 2020
- Volume 42 , pages 423–433, ( 2021 )
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- Jennifer MacLure 1
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This article focuses on medical trials performed by Dr. Albert Kligman on the inmates of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison between 1951 and 1974, which have been widely criticized as exploitative. I seek to investigate the mechanics behind the “ethical blind spot” that enabled the American medical community to laud Kligman for his efforts while simultaneously condemning the medical atrocities of the Holocaust and supporting the development of the Nuremberg Code. I argue that this nonrecognition hinges on a colonial logic by which certain populations are produced as waste, both rhetorically and materially. Drawing on the incarcerated men’s accounts included in Allen Hornblum’s books on the subject, I trace the process by which human beings come to be reclassified as natural resources and their exploitation recast as industrious cultivation.
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Ethics declarations
1 Indeed, submitting to medical experimentation could increase an inmate’s chance of gaining parole, and refusing to submit to experimentation could hinder his chances.
2 For a more in-depth analysis of the comparison between British slums and colonial jungles, see Mariana Valverde’s ( 1996 ) “The Dialectic of the Familiar and the Unfamiliar.”
3 If they had even been convicted. Many of the prisoners Kligman experimented on were awaiting trial and were only in prison because they did not have the money to post bail—money that they could earn by volunteering for Kligman’s experiments.
4 Jill Casid ( 2005 ) richly explores how European imperialism was reimagined “not as conquest but as cultivation” (95) in the eighteenth century in Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization .
5 Because I am focusing on the U.S. prison system, I do not address the many global historical moments in which colonialism and medical practice have overlapped more literally, as colonizing powers have controlled the medical care of their colonial subjects. David Braude Hillel ( 2009 ) discusses just one of these moments in “Colonialism, Biko and AIDS: Reflections on the Principle of Beneficence in South African Medical Ethics.”
6 In fact, many researchers, like Andrew M. Cislo and Robert Trestman ( 2013 ), feel that these restrictions have deterred even potentially beneficial medical research in prisons and that, as a result, conditions that affect incarcerated people, particularly mental health issues, are often woefully understudied. While acknowledging that prisoners are a vulnerable population and that extra care should be taken to ensure that consent is freely given and informed, David J. Moser agrees that prisoners have become an “overprotected population” and that clinicians are subsequently underinformed about their specific needs. For more on this, see Andrew Cislo and Robert Trestman, “Challenges and Solutions for Conducting Research in Correctional Settings: The U.S. Experience” and David J. Moser et al. ( 2004 ), “Coercion and Informed Consent in Research Involving Prisoners.”
7 Tim Holt and Tony Adams ( 1987 ) decried a similar practice in Great Britain when they noticed that medical students were travelling to developing countries and practicing skills “in ways which would be illegal in Britain,” treating people in these countries as “a population of second-class citizens, who, because of their economic predicament, have no choice but to accept the second-rate skills of unqualified students, and who deserve to be taken advantage of in this way” (102).
8 For more on this aspect of environmental justice, see Rob Nixon, 2011 , Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Boston : Harvard University Press.
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MacLure, J. Unnatural Resources: The Colonial Logic of the Holmesburg Prison Experiments. J Med Humanit 42 , 423–433 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-020-09651-5
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This article focuses on medical trials performed by Dr. Albert Kligman on the inmates of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison between 1951 and 1974, which have been widely criticized as exploitative. ... The Colonial Logic of the Holmesburg Prison Experiments J Med Humanit. 2021 Sep;42(3):423-433. doi: 10.1007/s10912-020-09651-5. Author Jennifer ...
Holmesburg prison.6 The story of Dr. Kligman's experiments was fully explored in 1998 in a book entitled Acres of Skin; the title is based on a quotation from Dr. Kligman himself, who recalled visiting Holmesburg prison for the first time and seeing "acres of skin" on which he could experiment.7
This study exposes and examines the medical research conducted on inmates at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison from the early 1950s through the mid-1970s. ... in exchange for a few dollars, as subjects in a host of medical experiments. The author argues that at Holmesburg the American medical establishment betrayed the ideals of the Hippocratic ...
Acres of skin: human experiments at Holmesburg Prison. A true story of abuse and exploitation in the name of medical science. Reviewed by: Tom Wilkie. Tom Wilkie. 1 The Wellcome Trust. ... Similar articles Cited by other articles Links to NCBI Databases Cite. Copy; Download .nbib.nbib; Format: Add to Collections. Create a new collection ...
This article focuses on medical trials performed by Dr. Albert Kligman on the inmates of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison between 1951 and 1974, which have been widely criticized as exploitative. I seek to investigate the mechanics behind the "ethical blind spot" that enabled the American medical community to laud Kligman for his efforts while simultaneously condemning the medical ...
of the Holmesburg Prison Experiments Jennifer MacLure1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract This article focuses on medical trials performed by Dr. Albert Kligman on the inmates of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison between 1951 and 1974, which have been widely criticized as exploitative.
This article focuses on medical trials performed by Dr. Albert Kligman on the inmates of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison between 1951 and 1974, which have been widely criticized as exploitative.
Unwitting consent: "Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison" tells the story of medical researchers who sacrificed the rights of their subjects for personal profit. Meyer CR. Minn Med, 82(7):53-54, 01 Jul 1999 Cited by: 0 articles | PMID: 11645180
View all Google Scholar citations for this article. ... Allen M Hornblum, Acres of skin: human experiments at Holmesburg Prison. A true story of abuse and exploitation in the name of medical science, New York and London, Routledge, 1998, pp. xxii, 297, illus., £18.99 (0-415-91990-8)
This article focuses on medical trials performed by Dr. Albert Kligman on the inmates of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison between 1951 and 1974, which have been widely criticized as exploitative. ... The Colonial Logic of the Holmesburg Prison Experiments. Jennifer MacLure ... Options Edit Mark as duplicate Find it on Scholar Request removal ...