Orphans as Guinea Pigs

In the decades between 1870 and 1930 the social and economic value of children in American society underwent a profound transformation. 1 The sentimentalization of children and the greater sensitivity to child mortality contributed to campaigns to promote child welfare, to the creation of a number of specialized institutions to enhance the physical and emotional well-being of American children, and to the development of a new medical specialty, paediatrics. The commitment to child health also spurred physicians to undertake researches that involved the use of both sick and healthy children, many of whom were inmates of orphanages or public hospitals, as experimental subjects. This chapter examines the use of children in medical research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although institutionalized children were more likely than their more prosperous counterparts to be reported as subjects of medical experiments, I will argue that physicians’ decisions to experiment on these populations reflected the intersection of competing professional obligations and personal commitments, rather than the uncomplicated exploitation of accessible children.