ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Intentional harm in human experiments on phloroglucinol, Paris (1960–1961)

• In Event: The Politics, Epistemology and Ethics of Medical Evidence, ca. 1960–ca. 2000

English Abstract

In 1960 and 1961, a group of French researchers published a series of experiments testing therapeutics for ‘biliary attack’, an illness believed to be more prevalent among women. These therapeutics included phloroglucinol, still heavily prescribed today in France, especially to women. The researchers used an experimental design called the ‘choleretic-morphine challenge’, which involved intentionally triggering harm in patients by injecting them with a choleretic and morphine, to subsequently test the therapeutics on the triggered symptoms. Subsequently, phloroglucinol was introduced to the French market and became increasingly popular.
In my talk, I take a close look at the experimental design used in these experiments to understand what they involved and why, at a logical, epistemological and ethical level. Historians agree that in post-World War II France almost any experimentation with a therapeutic goal was possible. Many dangerous experiments were deemed permissible; however, the limit was thought to be intentional harm. Yet the choleretic-morphine experiments had no therapeutic goal.
Using contemporary ethics debates and medical sources, I discuss how these experiments, published in scientific journals and publicly presented among peers, went against what medical researchers claimed at the time to believe about the limit of permissibility of medical experimentation. I finish by exploring the epistemological nature of the choleretic-morphine experiment. Even though the medical community of the time was aware of recent advances in evidential standards, they chose a radically different experimental design, illustrating the instability of contemporary standards of evidence.

Author

• Juliette Ferry-Danini, Université de Namur