Canada’s shameful history of nutrition research on residential school children: The need for strong medical ethics in Aboriginal health research

Abstract

While both science and research have very long and detailed histories, the formal history of medical ethics is short. The discipline’s foundation arises from the medical atrocities performed in the name of science by a cadre of Nazi doctors during World War II. The actions were so despicable that 20 physicians were put on trial in Nuremberg for violation of the Hippocratic Oath and behaviour incompatible with their education and profession. A result of this 1946 trial was the Nuremberg Code of Medical Ethics (1). Last year, Ian Mosby, a food historian and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph (Guelph, Ontario), revealed details of highly unethical nutrition experiments performed on Canadian Aboriginal children at six residential schools between 1942 and 1952 (2) – our own medical atrocities. The experiments were performed by the Department of Indian Affairs of Canada under the direction of two physicians: Dr Percy Moore, the Indian Affairs Branch Superintendent of Medical Services, and Dr Frederick Tisdall, a famed nutritionist, a former president of the Canadian Paediatric Society and one of three paediatricians at The Hospital for Sick Children (Toronto, Ontario) who developed Pablum infant cereal in the 1930s. In these experiments, parents were not informed, nor were consents obtained. Even as children died, the experiments continued. Even after the recommendations from the Nuremberg trial, these experiments continued.

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