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Fear and Lust in the Desert, or How Lies, Deception, and Trickery Made California a Date Palm Monopoly

From the editors: The Digest: Food in History is a new series from Not Even Past that focuses on the exciting field of food history . Across these pieces, contributors will explore the intimate intersections between food, people, ecologies, and history. The Digest: Food in History will publish a range of research connected to food production, distribution, and consumption and use this to reflect on wider historical questions.

In the first installment of The Digest, Atar David, a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of History and the Associate Editor for Not Even Past, reflects on some lesser known and more controversial aspects involved in the creation Southern California’s date production monopoly. The article invites readers to rethink their food conventions and question the relationship between food and power.

Southern California produces almost half of the date fruits consumed in the US today. But that was not always the case. Date fruits became popular among American consumers during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but since no one in the US grew dates for commercial purposes, supply depended on imports from the Middle East, especially from the Arab Gulf. The first attempts to cultivate dates on a commercial scale in Arizona and California began at the turn of the twentieth century. However, America still ran on imported dates until the 1920s, when the region around the Salton Sea became the leading date-producing center in the country. By the 1930s, California production was robust enough to reduce the need for imports and provide most local consumption.

How did Southern California become the leading date-producing region in the country? One possible explanation has to do with the local climates. The region’s long and dry summers are notoriously harsh and, for years, posed a challenge to settlers. But these climatic predicaments are advantageous for date palms (Phoenix Dactylifera L.), whose fruits can only ripen during extensive heat. Common narratives of California’s date sector often stress how federal officials import date palm offshoots (more on that to come) from the Middle East and perfected cultivation, packing, and distribution methods until they finally achieved victory over nature’s setbacks. According to this narrative, perseverance and ingenuity made California a date production center.

*Date Palm Grove in the Coachella Valley, February 1937. Source: Library of Congress*

My research, which examines the global circulation of date palm commodities from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, paints a more complex version of this story. As a part of my work, I got to know the federal agents involved in establishing the California date cultivation sector. Since they operated during the Progressive Era and were motivated by visions of improvement, I call them Date Boosters.

After reading correspondents, their memories, and their official reports, I realized that scientific curiosity and dreams of greening the desert were not date boosters’ only motivation. Instead, they were driven by a desire to establish and then maintain their monopoly over date cultivation. To do so, they sometimes lied, deceived, and ostracized other growers and fellow federal agents. As it turns out, their at-times shady actions were as meaningful to California’s ascendent to a national (and later global) date production center as the local climates. Examining some of the shadier aspects of their operation reveals the messy politics behind California’s successful date cultivation operation and the often-unspoken realities of the politics of food production.

Offshoot Monopoly

Date boosters had already started dreaming about an all-American date sector by the early 1890s. At that time, no one cultivated dates for commercial purposes in the US, and the only date palms around were the offspring of palms brought to the country by Spanish missionaries during the seventeenth century. Boosters imported seeds from Mexico and various places around the Middle East and planted them in the Southwest, hoping they would produce adequate (read: marketable) fruits. Soon, however, they discovered a problem that growers in the Middle East, who had cultivated date palms for thousands of years, were well aware of.

Seedlings (plants grown from seeds) often differ from their predecessors, resulting in fruits of various sizes, shapes, and tastes. Commercial agriculture, which is built on uniformity, predictability, and standardization, cannot rely on seedlings. Luckily for the boosters, date palms are also capable of vegetative (sometimes called asexual) propagation. Mature palms sprout tiny offshoots from their base. These suckers are genetically identical to the mother tree and can thus be cut and replanted, serving as the perfect building blocks for every new grove.

Date Palms along the Nile circa 1850. — *Date Palms along the Nile, photographed by Félix Teynard circa 1850. Source: Library of Congress*

At roughly the same time, the Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson, established the Section of Seed and Plant Introduction (SSPI). This USDA sub-division sent federal agents to various locations around the globe to collect new plants suitable for commercial cultivation in America. Some plant explorers, like Walter Swingle and David Fairchild, were also date boosters, fervently supporting the new date sector. For example, Walter Swingle and David Fairchild traveled to Egypt, North Africa, Oman, and Iraq to look for the best date types. They cut (or, rather, oversaw the cutting of) offshoots and carefully shipped them to agricultural experiment stations across Arizona and California. Overall, plant explorers imported several thousand offshoots during the early 1900s.

However, only a few of these made their way to local cultivators. This was not because of a lack of demand. With the expansion of offshoot importations, farmers around California and Arizona grasped their economic potential and contacted boosters, asking for a piece of the cake. During the early 1900s, dozens of farmers reached out to the agricultural experiment station at the University of Arizona, begging for some offshoots. But boosters refused to share their precious biological repository and preferred to keep offshoots for their experiments. Robert Forbes, the head of the station and a leading date booster, refused all farmers’ requests, offering prospective farmers to take the uncertain path of seedling cultivation. Boosters, who realized the economic importance of imported offshoot, began entrenching their monopoly over the young industry, deciding de facto who got to grow dates and who did not.

Trimming date palm offshoots before shipping them to the US, Algeria, June 1900. Source: Walter Swingle, The Date Palm and its Utilization in the Southwestern States (1904). Available at the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Date boosters also used their political power to prevent prospective farmers from privately importing offshoots. They feared that unregulated importation would risk the purity of their slowly growing biological repository by introducing subpar types to the Southwest. Even worse, some feared that private importers would lay their hands on some prime types, fostering an over-importation boom that would shake up the entire juvenile sector. In short, date boosters had an effective monopoly over offshoots importation and no desire to share power with anyone deciding to challenge it.

Some nevertheless tried. Bernard Johnson, a farmer from Walters, CA, dreamed of importing and selling offshoots by himself. In May 1902, he contacted Forbes, asking for his advice. Forbes tried to dissuade Johnson, arguing that offshoot importation was expensive, way beyond the layperson’s abilities. “Most of us,” he wrote, “will have to wait until Uncle Sam is ready to help us out.”[1] Johnson abandoned his plan for a while, only to renew it two years later while working for the newly established governmental date orchard in Mecca, CA. But traveling to the Middle East would take at least three months, and Johnson’s supervisors frowned upon his intention to leave the Mecca Garden for such a long period. They contacted Forbes, asking him to convince Johnson not to go. They also threatened Johnson that if he decided to leave, the federal government would sell the deed on his small ten-acre property to the local land development company. Following these threats, Johnson decided to leave the Mecca Garden for good, writing to Forbes, “I am very sorry indeed that I entered the employ of the Department of Agriculture.”[2] Even after he left, Johnson’s supervisors showed no mercy, cutting his plot from the nearby government well, forcing him to spend roughly $750 on digging a new well and setting new irrigation lines. All because he dared to challenge date boosters’ monopoly.

Ostracizing Texans

California’s hot climate is ideal for date cultivation, and it is no wonder that the American date palm sector prospered there. Why did places with similar climates – like parts of Texas, Nevada, or New Mexico – never become major date production centers? One possible explanation has to do with California agriculture more generally. From the mid-nineteenth century, the temperate climate in the Central Valley drew investors and made the Golden State a global agricultural hub. When date palms joined the party, many investors were looking for a way to capitalize on the country’s prospering gardens and were willing to invest in new projects. But there is more to that story. Much like Bernard Johnson’s case, date boosters blocked any attempts to challenge their monopoly, even if it meant actively going against other government agents.

In 1904, Harvey Stiles, a state horticultural inspector from Corpus Christi, Texas, traveled to the St. Louis World Fair, where he probably visited the new exhibit on date palms, courtesy of our old friend Forbes. Upon his return to Texas, he witnessed “date trees at fully half a dozen points, from Bee [he probably refers to Bee County, A.D.] down the coast to Corpus Christi and Brownsville and up the river valley, all looking well.”[3] Stiles began studying these trees and their adaptability to the south Texas climate, documenting local date cultivation along the Rio Grande and traveling to Mexico to secure pollen that would later serve him to pollinate local palms manually. Stiles then began canvassing for establishing “a plant laboratory, or whatever name it may carry” to develop a date palm industry in Texas. He dreamed of dethroning California and Arizona and cementing the Lone Star state as the new American date capital.

The Rio Grande Valley circa 1915. — *The Rio Grande Valley, one of the potential sites for date cultivation in Texas, circa 1915. Source: Library of Congress*

But boosters were not ready to share their resources and knowledge with other people. Walter Swingle, who was recently described as a central figure in developing date cultivation in Texas, [4] saw the potential in Western Texas’ climate, writing that “the lower Rio Grande… is a fair prospect of growing third-class dates in bulk to be sold in competition with the Persian Gulf dates now imported into this country in enormous quantities.”[5] At the same time, Swingle was more reluctant to include Texans in the date bonanza, arguing that only experienced people (read, his associates) should monitor prospective cultivation. Needless to say, Stiles was not the experienced person Swingle had in mind.

Alternatively, Swingle suggested appointing a USDA arboriculturist named Silas Mason to survey the true potential of southern Texas. “It is important,” Swingle concluded, “That this work [of promoting date-related science and production in Texas, A.D.] be done by us and that these plants are not handled by Stiles who can pervert the facts to suit his pursuit.” [6] While the federal government went on to experimenting with date cultivation in Laredo and building a pest-free date farm in Weslaco and Winter-Haven, Stiles was left out, selling seedlings from his private nursery.[7] Texas, who shone momentarily as the next big thing in date cultivation, never became a leading producer. Just ask anyone who has ever eaten a date grown in Texas.

Southern California became the country’s leading date-producing region thanks to its favorable climate and because the people who laid the industry’s foundations made sure to eliminate all competition from the get-go. That does not mean we should castigate or diminish their significant contribution to American agriculture. Instead, we should acknowledge the messy, awkward, and exciting histories of date cultivation and use them to reveal the political intrigues that shape food production. Date palms thus provide an excellent perspective into the history of fear and loath in the desert and an excellent gateway to larger questions of production and power.

Atar David is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department at UT Austin and the Associate Editor for Not Even Past. His dissertation research focuses on the circulation of agricultural commodities and agronomic knowledge between the Middle East and the American Southwest from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Together with Raymond Hyser, Atar founded the “Material History Workshop” – a bi-monthly graduate workshop centered around material culture. You can read more about the workshop here: https://notevenpast.org/uts-material-history-workshop/

[1] Forbes to Johnson, 5.31.1902, University of Arizona Special Collections, AZ 406, Box 11, Folder 6.

[2] Johnson to Forbes, 11.16.1904, University of Arizona Special Collections, AZ 406, Box 11, Folder 6.

[3] “Stiles to Wilson,” 5.14.1906, Date Palm Collection (MS 047) Box 2, File 40, Special Collections & University Archives, University of California, Riverside.

[4] Dennis Johnson and Jane MacKnight, “Date Palm Growing in South Texas,” PalmArbor, 2022.

[5] “Swingle to Galloway”, 10.19.1906, Date Palm Collection (MS 047) Box 2, File 40, Special Collections & University Archives, University of California, Riverside.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Johnson and MacKnight, “Date Palm Growing in South Texas,” 11–20.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Electric News in Colonial Algeria (2019) by Arthur Asseraf

Electric News in Colonial Algeria offers readers an understanding of how new forms of media and ordinary people came into contact with one another with increasing frequency during the period of French colonial occupation in Algeria. The major argument of this work has two premises. First, the dominance of a new form of media does not mean that the older forms become irrelevant but rather that the new forms add to an existing media ecosystem. As an example, the popularity of cinemas as spaces to consume media did not mean that print faded away. Second, this expanded media density and diversity in form and content over the course of the colonial also increased the polarization of Algerian society. This density of media facilitated through technologies that gradually condensed space, served more as a divisive factor than a unifying one in Algeria’s efforts toward fostering nationalism.

Book cover for Electric News in Colonial Algeria (2019) by Arthur Asseraf.

When Asseraf uses the word “electric” in this work, he is referring to more than just the literal infrastructure of electricity. Changing media landscapes created social shocks in Algeria as well. To put it another way, the news was metaphorically electric as it circulated just as much as it was actually electric in delivery. In constructing his work this way, Asseraf digs into what new forms of media and their circulation meant for social actors as they were consumed, rather than focusing on the media itself as a mouthpiece for editors. Also central to this work is the tension between the colonial state’s attempts to control media circulation and the reality of Algerians’ practices surrounding media consumption. Circulation in colonial Algeria involved more than the information the state freely allowed to circulate. It was also a matter of censorship and the options for circumventing restricted flow that ordinary Algerians participated in.

Although this book covers the entire French colonial period in Algeria, it gives the most weight to the early decades of the twentieth century. This serves as a strength since works on Algerian history have a tendency to pay more attention to flashpoint moments in the nation’s history, especially its war of independence from 1954 to 1962 and, to a lesser extent, the early period of colonial rule following French occupation in 1830. It is less common to see a work like this, which offers us a solid sense of what life was like for everyday Algerians in the early twentieth century.

Chapter One serves primarily to present background information constructing the relationship between early print in Algeria and the so-called civilizing mission of the colonial project. Chapters Two through Four likewise analyze various forms of media to help readers understand the increasingly diverse media landscape in colonial Algeria. The forms of media these chapters explore are, respectively, the telegraph at the turn of the twentieth century in Chapter Two; news, rumor, and songs about World War I in Chapter Three; and cinema and radio in the interwar period in Chapter Four. Chapter Five is distinctive, arguing that distance from nationalist struggles, such as those in Palestine and Libya, created the space for the Algerian press to debate a “proxy nationalism”. The conflicts in these places acted as a mirror, allowing Algerians to debate their own sense of national identity from a distance. More than anything, this chapter serves to complicate the neat divide we tend to place between foreign and domestic news.

*A view of colonial Algiers ca. 1900. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

The book’s introduction tackles a range of relevant historiographical issues: the relationship between media and nationalism, concerns about the dominance of technological determinism in previous works, and questions of directionality in circulation, flow, and blockage of information. Asseraf argues that the effect of media formats on circulation is subtle—essentially, he constructs his rejection of technological determinism by arguing that form does not bear too significantly on content, especially when considering how information circulates among human actors. In other words, the medium is not the message. As an example, Asseraf argues that the introduction of radio did not affect consumption as significantly as others have argued. News may have found new methods of spreading over time, but the act of spreading news was always more social in nature than anything else.

In a world where questions surrounding the relationship between the media ecosystem, the technologies that carry media, and political polarization have become increasingly salient to all of us, this work offers a historical perspective on how such processes have taken place in an earlier period. Furthermore, the book offers a perspective of these processes on the ground among everyday people, and not only at the state and private sector levels. Because of this, Electric News in Colonial Algeria is a highly accessible work that can be enjoyed by specialists and general audiences alike. Likewise, it is a book that those outside of the history and area studies fields can find fruitful, especially those with interests in media studies and anthropology.

Erin Kelleher is a third year PhD student in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at UT Austin. Her research areas are print culture and its circulation in Tunisia, as well as the Ottoman Empire’s enduring cultural legacy in North Africa.

Review of Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders (2023) by Isabel Huacuja Alonso

In Radio for the Millions, Isabel Alonso provides a captivating history of radio that sits at the intersection of sound studies, cultural history, and the politics of nationalism in modern South Asia. In this virtuosic tale, we read about the policymakers, artists, singers, political figures, and poets who inhabited a broader transnational space in South Asia. Using relatively neglected sources, as well as the usual range of newspapers, advertisements, posters, and memoirs, the book is pioneering in making radio the object of historical analysis.

Readers learn that radio played a vibrant role in forging political subjectivities and mobilizing identities during the anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century. It also created an aura around political figures. It was through the radio that the nationalist activist Subhas Chandra Bose remained a captivating figure and loomed large in the imagination of the listeners.

The history of rumors constitutes another fascinating aspect of this book’s narrative. Rumors about Bose, Radio Ceylon and its competitive relationship with All India Radio, the India-Pakistan war of 1965, and—last but not least—the famous singer Nur Jehan all constitute this larger fascinating arena of historical analysis.

Though the author does not identify her work as a contribution to ethnomusicology, her sensitivity to the place of music in a broader spectrum of sociability makes the book even more remarkable. Theoretically, following an Adornoian tradition, the literature around music in radio’s history has focused almost exclusively on radio’s role in promoting popular music and the notion of regression of listening. According to this theoretical tradition, radio and the popular industry made listeners passive consumers of the popular industry’s product. As a result, the relationship between the radio and the listeners is narrativized in a suspicious mode. This cynical approach towards radio has informed the historiographies of radio and sound in various contexts from the global South. In Iranian historiographies of radio, for instance, this Adornoian theoretical metanarrative has loomed large.

Alonso disrupts this tradition by focusing on the Director of All India Radio, B. V. Keskar, and his attempts to use radio to inculcate “discerning listeners.” The book shows how the newly independent Indian state considered radio the medium for developing “classical” tastes in Indian audiences. Keskar’s unease with popular culture marks an exciting point of departure for the revision of radio’s history globally. As Alonso’s work masterfully shows, “the citizen listeners” of radio – however briefly – became the subject of the elite’s cultural and artistic sensibilities, which at times sharply contrasted with that of the popular industry. In placing sound at the cusp of politics, nationalism, and identity, the author does not fall into the theoretical jargon sometimes associated with sound studies. While the book is theoretically informed and engaging, it is a situated historical work that brings sustained conceptual insights. Following Manan Ahmad’s work, the author argues for a transnational history of sound and sonic experience. The ‘soundscape’ of her book transcends the territorial limits of the nation-state.

*Nationalist leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah announcing the creation of an independent Pakistan over All India Radio, June 3rd, 1947. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

In a similar vein, Alonso’s coinage of the term “citizen listeners” gestures at a collectivity of listening subjects. The citizens of newly independent India (and Pakistan) became also citizen subjects through programs that were mediated via transmitters. Rich in its narrative and coverage of various aspects of sound, Radio for the Millions opens numerous interesting avenues for further investigation. For instance, we can certainly wonder about the ways in which listening “citizen subjects” thought about the sounds they heard on the radio and acted to shape the programming beyond writing letters.

This book will benefit an expansive community of readers, including academic communities in the disciplines of history and ethnomusicology and specifically readers interested in the cultural history of sound and music. It provides a wonderful model of the cultural history of sound and music for other societies, especially modern Iran, where writing cultural histories of sound and listening has been an arduous task.

Pouya Nekouei is a Ph.D. student in Middle Eastern history at the department of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas, Austin. His research interests pertain to the social and cultural history of Iran, the Indian Ocean world, and the connected social and cultural history of South Asia, Iran, and Europe.

Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War – a debate between suffering and medical knowledge for the greater good

banner image for Review of Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War

Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War by Susan Lederer explores the production of medical knowledge through human experimentation and animal vivisection. Lederer’s contextualization of the subject and her well-chosen examples enlighten readers and allow us to explore the intersection between politics, economy, medicine, and, of course, issues of ethical and moral character. One of the core topics in the book is the debate between the arguments of vivisectionists and antivivisectionists, vivisection being the practice of operating on live animals for the pursuit of scientific knowledge.[1] Through this discussion, one sees that the debate between the advancement of science, the greater good of society, and concerns about causing harm to the most vulnerable characterized the dialogue about human experimentation and animal vivisection in the early 20^th century.

Lederer considers three interlocking questions: why “did American physicians routinely perform non-therapeutic experiments on their patients?” and “who served as the subject of these experiments and what risks did they encounter?”.[2] These questions are essential to the historical significance of the book. Although the Nuremberg trials generated awareness of human experimentation and the consequences it could have while also establishing a set of rules and regulations, we cannot understand human experimentation without first understanding what happened before these trials. As Lederer put it, the Nuremberg trials are not the start of human experimentation but, instead, part of it.[3] That is why it is valuable to understand human experimentation before the Second World War. It allows us to understand the influence of technological developments and historical events like the X-ray and the Great Depression on what research is today. This is one of Lederer’s main arguments, which she addresses in the introduction and chapter one.

Scientists test yellow fever serum by injecting it into white mice. USPHS (United States Public Health Service) Rocky Mountain Laboratory, Hamilton, Montana circa 1942. Source: Library of Congress

The second chapter focuses on the claim that human experimentation must be looked at in the context of animal protection.[4] According to Lederer, antivivisectionists argued “it is not a question of animals or human beings, it is a question of animals and human beings”[5], showing how concerns for human experimentation started when the public became worried about animal welfare. The main argument was that “no progress in medicine… was worth the pain inflicted in laboratories by physicians and physiologists”.[6] Starting in 1866 with the establishment of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) by Henry Bergh and, later, the creation of various societies for the protection of children in New York and Pennsylvania in the 1870s, concerns over human experimentation were characterized by a preoccupation over those who were most vulnerable and did not have a voice.[7] These ideas circulated within the context of Darwinism, which fostered wider “acceptance of human and animal kinship”.[8]

In chapters three and four, Lederer poses a debate between the ideas of vivisectionists and antivivisectionists.[9] She refers to Hideyo Noguchi’s experiments, where healthy children and hospital patients were used to develop a luetin diagnostic test for syphilis.[10] She also talks about Arthur H. Wentworth’s “experimental tapping of the subarachnoid space,” which, according to Wentworth himself, caused “momentary pain” and “some children to shrink back and cry aloud”.[11] These types of experiments—which inflicted pain among vulnerable people like children—caused controversy among antivivisectionists. For example, Diana Belais, the president of the New York Antivivisection Society, claimed that medical knowledge was placed before the wellbeing of the most vulnerable. She along with lawmakers, like Republican senator Jacob H. Gallinger, tried to pass laws regulating vivisection.

Dr. Hideyo Noguchi (with back to camera) works in a research lab while William Alexander Young and Helen Russell watch. — *Dr. Hideyo Noguchi (with back to camera), William Alexander Young, and Helen Russell at the Medical Research Institute in Accra, Ghana circa 1928. Source: Wellcome Collection*

Meanwhile, in addressing vivisectionists’ arguments, Lederer talks about the American Medical Association (AMA) and Abraham Flexner’s survey of medical education, Charles W. Eliot’s reforms at Harvard Medical School, and the surge of research as the gold standard for creating medical knowledge. [12] Her sources rely on public statements from William H. Welch, the dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and William W. Keen, the president of the AMA from 1899 to 1900. In contrast to antivivisectionists, vivisectionists’ main argument was that physicians had the obligation to generate medical knowledge, “to heal the sick, to check disease and to prevent death”, all of which could be achieved through vivisection and by having fewer restrictions in the law.[13]

The author also discusses issues that, despite being interesting because of their historical relevance, are incredibly heartbreaking. In chapter five, she delves deeper into the use of the most vulnerable—namely children, prisoners, soldiers, the poor, and those socially marginalized—as subjects for human experimentation. Experiments like those performed by J. Marion Sims on “black female slaves… to test his discovery of a repair for vesico-vaginal fistula”[14] are disturbing because of the intersection between social and political conditions with medicine. However, this discussion could have benefitted from a more in-depth discussion of race, social hierarchies, and inequality. Although Lederer used sources like articles from the Journal of Experimental Medicine, quotes from multiple figures, extracts from the magazine Life, and statements from the American Humane Association, she could have included a more human perspective from those who were experimented on, especially since the history of medicine deals with emotions and not just bodies and medical knowledge. Chapter five’s focus on the subjects of human experimentation introduces sub-arguments related to the issue of consent and whether we can justify experimentation on people whose consent cannot be obtained (like children) or is dependent on political or economic factors.

Despite debates on the ethics of human experimentation, chapter six demonstrates that research and “the discovery of insulin, sulfa drugs, and new treatments for pernicious anemia” eventually helped inspire confidence in medical researchers and doctors.[15] They began to be seen as heroes, as “those who survived their bouts with laboratory-acquired infections earned praise”.[16] There is a special mention of Walter Reed—who proved yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes—and Jesse Lazear—who was in Reed’s group and died from yellow fever as a result of self-experimentation.[17] This conclusion allows readers to see how research “became an integral part of [the] academic medicine”[18] and how it was influenced by everything that was discussed in previous chapters, further illuminating the historical relevance of the book.

*A scientist dispenses yellow fever vaccine into ampules. USPHS (United States Public Health Service) Rocky Mountain Laboratory. Hamilton, Montana circa 1942. Source: Library of Congress*

Lederer’s book brilliantly explores what human experimentation was like before the Second World War by making reference to important figures like William W. Keen, William H. Welch, Diana Belais, and Jacob Gallinger and using sources like extracts from scientific journals and quotes from those involved. It is enlightening to read as it gives readers an insight into the arguments of both vivisectionists and antivivisectionists. Also, the idea that human experimentation cannot be understood without knowing what happened before the Nuremberg trials is valuable because the history of human experimentation does not have a beginning or an end: it is embedded in an ebb and flow of political, economic, and social circumstances. This book should be read by anyone who seeks to understand the complexities behind human experimentation. It is through books like this that we become aware of the implications of the creation of scientific knowledge and better understand ourselves as humans.

Juliana Márquez is a sophomore at the Johns Hopkins University majoring in Molecular & Cellular Biology. She has always been interested in the connections between epistemology and history. Since taking a class on the History of Modern Medicine, Juliana immediately found a passion for understanding how scientific and medical knowledge is created. She hopes to use this understanding to have a more human-based approach to science.

References

Goodman, Jordan, Anthony McElligott, and Lara Marks. “Making Human Bodies Useful: Historicizing Medical Experiments in the Twentieth Century.” Essay. In Useful Bodies: Humans in the Service of Medical Science in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

“vivisection.” In Concise Medical Dictionary, edited by Law, Jonathan, and Elizabeth Martin. : Oxford University Press, 2020. https://www-oxfordreference-com.proxy1.library.jhu.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780198836612.001.0001/acref-9780198836612-e-10814.

Lederer, Susan. 1995. Subjected To Science: Human Experimentation In America Before The Second World War. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

[1] Jonathan Law and Elizabeth Martin, “vivisection”, 2020

[2] Susan Lederer, Subjected to Science, XV

[3] Jordan Goodman, Anthony McElligott and Lara Marks, “Making Human Bodies Useful”, 3

[4] Lederer, XV

[5] Lederer, 101

[6] Lederer, 42

[7] In this chapter, Lederer alludes to the heartbreaking case of Mary Ellen Wilson, a 9-year-old girl who got beaten by her stepmother, as a catalyst for a growing concern for children and the creation of societies that cared about the wellbeing of the most vulnerable; Lederer, 28

[8] Lederer, 30

[9] Since there are various perspectives around human experimentation, Lederer does not only have one central argument. Instead, she addresses the perspective of both sides to contextualize human experimentation as a whole and go deep into what human experimentation was like before the Second World War.

[10] Lederer, 83

[11] Lederer, 62

[12] Lederer, 54-55

[13] Lederer, 100

[14] Lederer, 115

[15] Lederer, 126

[16] Lederer, 130

[17] Lederer, 18

[18] Lederer, 127

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Offshoot Monopoly

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