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Thesis ID: CBB001567417

Fighting Polio: Selling the Gamma Globulin Field Trials, 1950--1953 (cited 2012)

University of Cambridge (United Kingdom)
Cambridge University
Publication date: cited 2012
Language: English

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Experimental medicine Clinical trials Poliomyelitis Vaccines; vaccination Hematology Placebo Public health 20th century United States Roosevelt, Franklin D.

Connor, sponsored an audacious human medical experiment. Led by University of Pittsburgh polio researcher Dr William McD. Hammon, the field test of a human blood fraction known as gamma globulin marked the first time that a large placebo-controlled clinical trial was conducted on healthy civilian children in American history. By drawing on private institutional records, scientific meeting minutes, oral histories, and historical newspapers, this dissertation explores the ethics and marketing of the experiment from its inception to its conclusion and the subsequent national inoculation program in 1953. Although the study, conducted in select areas of Utah, Texas and Iowa, was a marketing success that tested the boundaries of what civilians would tolerate in a moment of crisis, it was a scientific and ethical failure that harboured a range of adverse reactions. For Hammon and his allies, maintaining the perception of scientific progress in the war against the fearsome specter of polio emerged as a vital rationale to persist with the study and defend its aftermath. ]]>

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Description Defense date not indicated; cited by UMI in 2012. Cited in ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing. Proquest Document ID: 1442475246.

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