| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 217 words from this article are provided below; about 377 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Treatment: The Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests. By Martha Stephens. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. xxii, 349 pp. $28.95, ISBN 0-8223-2811-9.)

Martha Stephens's The Treatment is a comprehensive and powerful account of one of the most important radiation experiments performed on unsuspecting civilians in post–World War II America.

In the spring of 1960 a research project was started within the Cincinnati General Hospital and funded by the Defense Atomic Support Agency of the United States Department of Defense. Over the course of the next eleven years, ninety people were irradiated over all or half of their bodies. The total body irradiations (TBI) were among the worst of the human radiation experiments of the Cold War era, and the Cincinnati project was probably the most harmful of several TBI experiments. The Cincinnati experiments were begun late, after researchers in other parts of the country had acquired data that showed how harmful radiation was. The patients were all suffering from cancer, though functioning well in their daily lives. Stephens suggests that, since most were poor and elderly African Americans, they were never told that the procedure was extremely dangerous, nor that about one-third of the patients were dying within a few weeks of the radiation exposures.

. . .

There are about 377 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.