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

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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."

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.