A Tale of Moral Courage in World War II, Chronicled Through Cartoons

‘Infected for Science’By Sydney Halpern. lllustrations by Trygve Faste Graphic Mundi, 196 pagesDavid Miller, a religious pacifist, wanted to make a patriotic contribution to his country’s participation in World War II. Like other conscientious objectors, he had confronted public attacks on his integrity and lack of courage, especially from those with families who had sent their sons and brothers to fight. When Miller was told he could sign up for government-sponsored medical experiments, he decided to join a camp of conscientious objectors who had volunteered to be infected with the hepatitis virus. In the years after the war, he never told his family about what he had done, yet he had kept a record of his hazardous duty in a series of cartoons.Sydney Halpern tells the riveting story of how she learned about Miller and his fellow volunteers, and why she decided to employ a cartoon format that paid tribute to Miller’s extraordinary courage, determination, and good will as part of a mission to understand how hepatitis was transmitted and what could be done to treat the disease.Miller’s cartoons, included in the blue wash sections of “Infected for Science,” do not tell the whole story, especially the part of it that raises ethical concerns about how much the experimental subjects were told, and the extent to which they could make informed decisions.Trygve Faste’s cartoons create the context in which Miller and his fellow experimental subjects lived, establishing a camaraderie not unlike what soldiers experience in war. Through a series of dialogue scenes, these men bond in a shared belief in themselves and their government’s noble intentions. Mr. Faste’s cartoons also deal with the reactions of Miller’s family when they learn about what he had suffered during the war.Miller’s cartoons show his extraordinary good humor and resilience even as he depicted the sometimes terrifying administration of injections that made many of the volunteers quite sick, and with lasting damage to their health that the doctors had not anticipated. I wondered why Miller’s cartoons were so cheerful as compared to Mr. Faste’s sobering, retrospective drawings. I can only guess, but judging by the exuberant style of Miller’s work, it seems that he felt scared but exhilarated by putting himself in harm’s way, putting at rest for himself, at least, the charges that he was a coward.Ms. Halpern works into the cartoon narrative the experience of volunteers in other camps, including prisoners and the mentally disabled. The safety and ethical protocols now in place — many of them worked out in the 1970s — were not applied during the war or even into the 1950s before such experimental programs were shut down.Ms. Halpern’s own experience as a researcher (she is identified as a historical sociologist studying the moral dilemmas of medical research) is part of the story of experiments she discovered in an archive, experiments that were never meant to be publicized and that she wrote about in “Dangerous Medicine: The Story Behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis,” published by Yale University Press in 2021.“Infected for Science” makes Ms. Halpern’s research concrete, graphic, and includes Miller’s cartoons as primary sources for the point of view of medical experiment subjects. Toward the end of the book, Miller’s children become characters in the story as they ask pointed questions not only about what happened to their father, but about the ramifications of treating human subjects as, in effect, laboratory animals.David Miller never seems to have regretted his choice to participate in the experiments. He even helped organized a “pre-inoculation dance,” featuring a cartoon with a happy doctor administering an injection with the caption: ‘HARPOONING PIGS.” Ms. Halpern adds her own caption: “THE CARTOONS RIBBING THE DOCS WERE A HIT.” Mr. Faste shows the horrified reactions of Miller’s family, but Ms. Halpern’s captions probably get it right: Miller’s cartoons fostered a sense of community expressed in “gallows humor.”Ms. Halpern and Mr. Faste are not interested in casting blame. On the contrary the captioned cartoons reflect the evolving understanding of what it means to experiment on human beings, even with the best of intentions that get distorted, sometimes, in government priorities in emergences and, specifically, in the attitudes of doctors and program administrators seeking to alleviate the suffering of men on the battlefield and among the armed forces in general. Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”

A Tale of Moral Courage in World War II, Chronicled Through Cartoons

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