Sick to Death: An American Medical Epic
- Seth Augenstein
- Jul 7, 2018
- 3 min read
The clouds of bacteria were set loose on the 800,000 people of San Francisco one foggy September day in 1950. Serratia mascarens and Bacillus globigii were thought to be harmless, and the U.S. government wanted to try a “dry run” of a biological weapons attack. For hours, thousands of people breathed in millions of particles. The health implications were never fully understood, although about a dozen were hospitalized – and one person ended up dead with an infection that doctors and nurses had never seen before.
It sounds insane, like speculative fiction – like something a fiction writer would create out of whole cloth. But it’s fact. And it’s just one of more than 200 such tests carried out on millions of unsuspecting Americans during the height of the Cold War. Some of the testing grounds: the Pennsylvania Turnpike… and the New York Subway. The richest source I have found on this is the horrifying book Clouds of Secrecy by Leonard Cole.
This tale is also just one chapter in a sometimes-sick American history.
From the outset of the arrival of Europeans in this untamed New World, it was germs that forged the place which would become the Land of the Free – and the Home of the Immune.
It was smallpox and simple viruses which wiped out entire tribes of natives, from Inuit to Inca, from Apache to Lenni Lenape. Most often these pandemics were accidentally spread… but then there were the stories of smallpox blankets and purposeful contagion, gleefully documented in some accounts from colonial times.
Also in the annals are the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, the very name of which still sends shudders down the spines of entire populations of Americans to this day. These human experiments – when government doctors allowed its own citizens to fester with “bad blood,” and simply stood by as they died over decades – could come out of a totalitarian playbook.
The historical examples abound, and there are too many to mention here. Another syphilis experimentation program was secreted away down in Guatemala in the mid-20th century. One doesn’t read nearly as much about that, but its aims were just as insidious. More hushed-up are the allegations of active biological weapons use by the United States in the Korean War; is that simply Chinese Cold War propaganda, or something more?
Which brings me to the underpinnings of our modern American germ arsenal. The American authorities cut deals with some of the worst war criminals in the annals, the doctors and personnel of Imperial Japan’s Unit 731 and its various appellations. In the months after World War II, we shook hands with these mass murderers and started importing their expertise – including precious data about how long a person lives when vivisected without anesthetic.
Ever since, the U.S.’s “BW” program has been a world leader, as documented by Cole and others.
I took this history and cranked it up a notch for my forthcoming novel, Project 137. Set in the year 2087, it imagines a doctor peeling back these layers – only to discover that the military-industrial evil actually stretches back to the century before. The medical thriller is – sadly – based on some of the worst World War II history you probably never learned in school.
So as I sit here on my porch, in the heat of a July the Fourth marking the 242nd birthday of our fierce independence in America, I can reflect as my grill heats up and a thunderstorm whisks across my acre of land which was once a pass-through for the local Lenni Lenape tribes, now long since gone. America is, yes indeed, a proud and great country, among the best in all of history. But any patriot would have to be blind or ignorant to not acknowledge that part of it is diseased, and rotten to the core.
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