Creepiest science experiments: The thirst for knowledge in the scientific community is unquenchable. Mankind’s capacity for cruelty towards one another is immeasurable. When the two collide, all manner of hell is likely to break loose. Since the age when doctors would carve a dirty great hole into your skull at the merest sign of a sniffle, scientists have always viewed experimentation as a necessary evil in order to progress.
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While those being experimented upon are usually willing participants, sometimes things can go badly wrong and ruin, or even cost lives. Some of these sacrifices may be worthwhile and lead to great discoveries, but just as frequently they are the worthless products of experiments that are utterly deranged and unbelievably creepy.
While cases such as Josef Mengele’s surgery on twins are very well-known and decried as repulsive, there are many other cases which are far more obscure, but equally troubling. From cyborg rats to schoolchildren tripping on acid – and a woman whose self-love cost her the sense of smell – we shall look at ten medical experiments which were not only creepy, but borderline sadistic. Be sure to check the fine print before you next partake in medical trials.
10. The Hofling Hospital Experiment
When a dictator such as Hitler or Stalin commits mass murder, it is hard to imagine how a population can seemingly sit back and let such horrors occur. After the second World War, many questioned the complicity of civilians in Axis countries due to the fact that atrocities were committed in the name of the regime without intervention or complaint.
However, this flies in the face of scientific rationale – human beings are conditioned to unquestionably accept orders from authority figures.
To prove this theory, the psychiatrist Charles K. Hofling conducted experiments in the field to test the nature of obedience between physicians and nurses. In 1966, he used a real hospital setting to give orders from nameless doctors, for nurses to administer a dose of the fictional drug Astroten, that was double the stated maximum dose of 10mg. Despite the fact that they knew the dose would be fatal to patients and it was against hospital regulations to follow orders from a doctor they didn’t know, 21 out of the 22 nurses were happy to carry out the orders.
While no patients were harmed – the nurses were stopped at their doors en route to administer the dose – the experiment is hair-raising stuff. Hofling seemed to prove his theory that a person will acquiesce to the wishes of an authority figure in the knowledge that the orders they are carrying out may have horrific consequences.
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