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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 101.3 | The History Cooperative
101.3  
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September, 2005
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Reviews

The Treatment
The Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests

By Martha Stephens
(Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xxi, 349. Illustrations, appendices, notes, sources, index. $29.95.)

This is the story of experimental radiation procedures designed by the radiology group at the University of Cincinnati Medical School and used on about ninety seriously ill cancer patients from 1960 to 1972. Patients tended to be poor, and sixty percent were African American. All died, most before the term indicated by regular diagnosis. They were human subjects in one of a series of more than 4,000 such experiments funded by the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, and other federal agencies. 1
      Martha Stephens divides her account into three sections: discovery and public knowledge of the hitherto semi-secret experiments; case studies of selected families; and legal issues and trial. Stephens learned of the radiation experiments about the time they were being concluded, in 1974. As a member of the Junior Faculty Associates at the university, she began her investigations because she felt that "what had happened ... touched me directly" (p. 8). "It seemed to me then," she writes, "and it seems to me now, that we had become a secret slaughterhouse, a secret death camp" (pp. 8–9). Her horror and outrage inform the whole book. The author does not offer a history of whole-body radiation, nor an analysis of oncology from the 1970s onward. There is no broad perspective. . . .
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