Tuskegee North: Canada Matches America

Returning to Toronto a week ago we walked right into a raging storm. Though it had nothing to do with weather, it was a storm that created considerable turbulence, nevertheless. The disturbance came out of the dusty corners of academic research located within a Canadian university department of history. Results of this research were published recently in the journal, Social History in a paper entitled “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952”

The author, Ian Mosby, was a postdoctoral student when he went through records of the Canadian scientific and administrative elite of the era and discovered how they were trying out ideas on the treatment of malnutrition in Aboriginal children held captive in so-called residential schools. Children attending the schools were kept on a starvation diet of poor nutritional quality and ended up being severely malnourished. The scientists, doctors, nurses, anthropologists, etc saw these children as an opportunity to advance their careers, subjecting the starving children to controlled experiments in which one group was given nutritional supplements whilst another was maintained only on the starvation diet that had caused them to be malnourished in the first place. And all this was done neither with the consent of the parents nor the agreement of the experimental subjects themselves, and ignoring the risk of potential injury to them. To add to the indignities and anguish of the defenceless children, the researchers undertook detailed physical examinations and blood sampling procedures that were obviously painful.

Curiously, all this was taking place at the same time that the infamous Tuskegee experiment was in full swing in America. That project, undertaken by the United States Public Health Service, had as its aim, determining the natural history of untreated syphilis among African-American men in Alabama at a time when treatment for the disease was already available.

In circumstances like this, it may be difficult to distinguish Canadian social policies towards its subject population from the Americans’ to theirs. Nor can it be easy to distinguish those of colonial Britain in Africa who, as far as I can recall, sought neither the consent of my parents nor my prior agreement when they descended on my village in the late 1940’s to test its children for malaria parasites (I think) in our infant school. All I can remember is the terror that we felt when the bowl-hatted characters arrived at the school, lancets drawn, to administer punctures and squeeze blood out of our little fingers. The general weeping and wailing that accompanied this assault on our persons remains permanently imprinted on the memory.

And I still feel the pain.

Tell Fren Tru