Medicine: Guinea Pigs?

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Surgery in the asylum

The allegations sounded like excerpts from the script of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Lawyer Patrick Murphy, who filed a suit in Chicago last week, charged that between 25 and 100 patients in Illinois' Manteno Mental Health Center underwent "unauthorized and secret" experimental surgery in the 1950s and '60s at the University of Chicago's Billings Hospital. The surgery removed their adrenal glands, organs atop the kidneys, which produce cortisone and other hormones. The supervising surgeon: Dr. Charles B. Huggins, 77, winner of a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on hormonal treatment of cancer.

A University of Chicago spokesman angrily branded Murphy's allegations "exaggerations and misstatements." In defense of Huggins and the university, he produced a research paper, published in 1958, that appeared to explain the surgery: it was performed seven years earlier with family consent on only six schizophrenics, two of whom also had cancer -one in the prostate gland, the other in the breasts.

According to the spokesman, the two cancer operations were clearly therapeutic. The other surgery, he explained, was based on a possible connection between hormonal function and schizophrenia.

Murphy, who as Cook County's public guardian is responsible for legally incompetent wards of the state, responded with further charges. At week's end, he quoted a psychiatrist's memo that said the center was "virtually a human dog lab." At Murphy's request, a judge issued an order barring destruction of any records that might shed light on the case. Huggins, for his part, left no doubt about what he thought of the suit: "It stinks."