The Treatment: The Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests

This book covers radiation experiments done on civilian populations for military research. I picked this up because I read Eileen Welsome's The Plutonium Files (which was great). The author refers to Welsome's book several times, and it felt like one has to read the Plutonium Files to truly enjoy this book. I think this book is a great expansion of the Plutonium Files theme. I don't believe that it is a great stand-alone book on the subject. The first third of the book primarily deals with the suppression of information regarding the experiment. The middle third of the book was the most interesting to me, because it dealt more with the experiments and the victims. The final third of the book dealt mainly with the families and their show more struggle for justice in the court system. The most impactful part of this book actually came at the end. The author includes appendices that list the names of each victim as well as how much radiation they were subjected to. This by itself impacted me more than anything in the text did. The author also includes testimony from one of the main doctors, as he tries to explain how this was all done to "help" the patients. This kind of story should be told, but the book wasn't put together as well as it could have been. show less

I picked this book up because I live in Ohio, but had never heard of radiation experiments being done in Cincinnati. I found the book to be both interesting and shocking. How could Department of Defense radiation tests being done on over a hundred unsuspecting people, who thought they were being treated for their diseases, have remained a secret for so long? And why wasn't there more of a public outcry when the details were finally released?