The Treatment: The Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests [Hardcover]

Martha Stephens (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0822328119 | ISBN-13: 978-0822328117 | Publication Date: January 2, 2002 | Edition: 1

The Treatment is the story of one tragedy of medical research that stretched over eleven years and affected the lives of hundreds of people in an Ohio city. Thirty years ago the author, then an assistant professor of English, acquired a large set of little-known medical papers at her university. These documents told a grotesque story. Cancer patients coming to the public hospital on her campus were being swept into secret experiments for the U.S. military; they were being irradiated over their whole bodies as if they were soldiers in nuclear war. Of the ninety women and men exposed to this treatment, twenty-one died within a month of their radiations.
Martha Stephens’s report on these deaths led to the halting of the tests, but local papers did not print her charges, and for many years people in Cincinnati had no way of knowing that lethal experiments had taken place there. In 1994 other military tests were brought to light, and a yellowed copy of Stephens’s original report was delivered to a television newsroom. In Ohio, major publicity ensued—at long last—and reached around the world. Stephens uncovered the names of the victims, and a legal action was filed against thirteen researchers and their institutions. A federal judge compared the deeds of the doctors to the medical crimes of the Nazis during World War II and refused to dismiss the researchers from the suit. After many bitter disputes in court, they agreed to settle the case with the families of those they had afflicted. In 1999 a memorial plaque was raised in a yard of the hospital.
Who were these doctors and why had they done as they did? Who were the people whose lives they took? Who was the reporter who could not forget the story, the young attorney who first developed the case, the judge who issued the historic ruling against the doctors? This is Stephens’s moving account of all that transpired in these lives and her own during this epic battle between medicine and human rights.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From 1960 to 1972, a grisly and highly suspect research project was carried out in the bowels of Cincinnati General Hospital. Cancer patients, most of them in advanced stages of the disease, were exposed to massive quantities of radiation over long and continuous periods of time. Nearly all of them (over 100 altogether) died within weeks or months of the start of the irradiation "therapy." In 1971 Stephens, a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, began to make inquiries about the Cincinnati project; despite the hospital authorities' reluctance, she eventually gained access to files documenting the treatments. They were, she says, horrifying records of misery, incompetence and medical hubris, and Stephens dedicated the next 30 years to publicizing them. Unfortunately, the story she relates here is less concerned with the patients than with herself: only about 70 pages are actually dedicated to a description and analysis of the experiments, while the rest of the book is a detailed, boring and highly self-serving account of the author's experiences with the press and the courts. While there appears to be little doubt that the Cincinnati project was a grotesque abuse of medical ethics and simple human decency, Stephens seems positively to revel in it as proof of the racism (most of the patients were black) and mendacity of the medical and political establishment. And while her dedication in bringing the case to light is admirable, her presentation of the parties involved ("She had believed the doctors, had automatically believed the doctors. I didn't feel she cared about common people but only about important people.") is as tendentious as it is simplistic. B&w photos.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

From 1960 through 1971, more than 80 cancer patients were treated with partial or total body radiation at Cincinnati General Hospital as part of an experiment conducted on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense. A number of the patients died a short time after the radiation exposure, which was administered in an attempt to simulate the possible effects of nuclear war on soldiers. While the experiments were kept relatively quiet until 1994, the project raised serious issues relating to informed consent, the appropriateness of the treatment, and the intent of the research. These concerns eventually led to extensive investigations, a congressional hearing, and a lengthy lawsuit. A novelist and former professor of English, Stephens (Children of the World) is active in many social causes and was a member of a junior faculty organization that first attempted to raise awareness of this project in the 1970s. Based on hospital records, interviews with the victims' families, government reports, and University of Cincinnati disclosures, the book provides a shocking example of why we must remain diligent in our review of medical research. Recommended for all collections. Tina Neville, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books; 1 edition (January 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822328119
• ISBN-13: 978-0822328117
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,483,367 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Accurate and Compelling Book on Radiation Experiments in Cincinnati, December 2, 2010

By 

retired professor (cincinnati) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Treatment: The Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests (Hardcover)

The Treatment tells the story of a horrifying miscarriage of medical research in the sixties. At least ninety-nine individuals were affected. They were irradiated over their whole bodies, or sometimes half their bodies, in a huge Cobalt-60 machine in the basement of Cincinnati General Hospital, and twenty-one died within about a month of being exposed. They were patients coming to a hospital cancer clinic when they were swept into this study funded by the Department of Defense. They and their families thought they were being treated for their disease, but University of Cincinnati doctors working with the military were trying to find out what would happen to soldiers in nuclear war.
Part One of this book outlines the long struggle of Stephens and her associates to bring this project to light. In 1994 she was able to uncover, with the help of a student at the university, the full names of the subjects and to initiate a lawsuit. Part Two provides the medical facts of the research over eleven years and how it affected each victim -- and in particular a group of surviving families the writer came to know well. Part Three describes each stage of the five years of litigation in federal court, which ended in 1999 in a settlement by the doctors of five million dollars.
Stephens writes that she had come to think of the people of this drama as "an invisible army that fought by night," unaware, that is, of what was happening to them and the military role they were performing.
This book seems to be widely read and to have had many good reviews. I notice that The Journal of American History considers it "a comprehensive and powerful account of one of the most important radiation experiments performed on unsuspecting civilians in post-World War II America."

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Should be called :The Story of the Story, August 16, 2007

By 

Kathleen "Pink Pimpernel" (fairview park, OH, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Treatment: The Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests (Hardcover)

This book really isn't about the victims of the tests at all. I spent the entire first half of the book waiting for the story of the tests to start when I finally figured out that the whole book is really about the author. The book discusses (in great detail) the travails of bringing the tests & information about them into the open, but there is almost no information about the victims, the tests, the system that allowed the tests to happen. Gave up; waste of time.