Ask Bookie
The Great Starvation Experiment : The Heroic Men Who Starved So That Millions Could Live
Overview
What does it feel like to starve? To feel your body cry out for nourishment, to think only of food? How many fitful, hungry nights must pass before dreams of home-cooked meals metastasize into nightmares of cannibalism? Why would anyone volunteer to find out? In The Great Starvation Experiment, historian Todd Tucker tells the harrowing story of thirty-six young men who willingly and bravely faced down profound, consuming hunger. As conscientious objectors during World War II, these men were eager to help in the war effort but restricted from combat by their pacifist beliefs. So, instead, they volunteered to become guinea pigs in one of the most unusual experiments in medical history -- one that required a year of systematic starvation. Dr. Ancel Keys was already famous for inventing the K ration when the War Department asked for his help with feeding the starving citizens of Europe and the Far East at the war's end. Fascists and Communists, it was feared, could gain a foothold in war-ravaged areas. "Starved people," Keys liked to say, "can't be taught Democracy." The government needed to know the best way to rehabilitate those people who had been severely underfed during the long war. To study rehabilitation, Keys first needed to create a pool of starving test subjects. Gathered in a cutting-edge lab underneath the football stadium at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Keys' test subjects forsook most food and were monitored constantly so that Dr. Keys and his scientists could study the effects of starvation on otherwise healthy people. While the weight loss of the men followed a neat mathematical curve, the psychological deterioration was less predictable. Some men drank quarts and quarts of water to fill their empty stomachs. One man chewed as many as forty packs of gum a day. One man mutilated himself to escape the experiment. Ultimately only four of the men were expelled from the experiment for cheating -- a testament to the volunteers' determination and toughness. To prevent atrocities of the kind committed by the Nazi doctors, international law now prevents this kind of experimentation on healthy people. But in this remarkable book, Todd Tucker captures a lost sliver of American history -- a time when cold scientific principles collided with living, breathing human beings. Tucker depicts the agony and endurance of a group of extraordinary men whose lives were altered not only for the year they participated in the experiment, but forever.
This item is Non-Returnable
Customers Also Bought
- 1
Details
- ISBN-13: 9780743270304
- ISBN-10: 0743270304
- Publisher: Free Press
- Publish Date: May 2006
- Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.35 pounds
- Page Count: 288
Related Categories
You May Also Like...
- 1
A little-known contribution to the war effort
In 1944, U.S. researchers conducted what is still considered to be the definitive study on human starvation. The goal was not to replicate the then-famine conditions of World War II Europe, but to scientifically isolate and examine the effects of hunger from various perspectives. The hope was that the information obtained would be used to alleviate suffering and death. Todd Tucker's compelling and provocative narrative of that experience, The Great Starvation Experiment: The Heroic Men Who Starved So That Millions Could Live, shows how three disparate groupsscientists, the U.S. military and the conscientious objectors who volunteered to be human guinea pigscollaborated for a "combination of national security, humanitarian, and scientific" reasons.
The idea for the project came from Dr. Ancel Keys, perhaps best known for the "K Ration" issued to U.S. troops during the war. Dr. Keys had used pacifist draftees, who were officially part of the Civilian Public Service, in other experiments. In the one Tucker writes about here, each man was to attain the normal weight for his height during the first three months of the experiment. In the second period, there would be six months of starvation with each man's diet cut in half, causing him to endure a 25 percent weight loss. Keys' goal was "nothing less than a complete cataloging of every quantifiable change that occurs in a famished human being," writes Tucker. The final three months, the rehabilitation periodwhat Tucker refers to as "the heart of the study"was concerned with recovery diets and recording the effects.
Tucker follows the volunteers through each phase, and we get to know several as individuals as they endure the grueling ordeal with varying degrees of physical and psychological deterioration. (One, Max Kampelman, impressively, completed his law school course and became an attorney while engaged in the experiment.) Of the original group of 36, 32 made it to the rehabilitation phase. Interviewed in later years, many said participating in the experiment was "the most important experience of their lives." For Keys, the most significant finding of the study was, Tucker writes, "that the human body was supremely well equipped to deal with starvation. . . . The human body was very, very tough."
The author enlightens us about the evolving history of conscientious objection in the U.S. Many CO's served as combat medics in World War II, including Desmond T. Doss, a devout Seventh-day Adventist, who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroic actions on Okinawa. Tucker also contrasts Keys' experiment, which used idealistic volunteers, with the horrible "medical experiments" conducted on unwilling victims in Nazi Germany and Japan and traces the attempts by the international medical community to deal with the abuse of human beings in such studies.
This well-searched and lucidly written account captures an important experiment little known to the general public. It is consistently compelling and provocative.
Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.
A little-known contribution to the war effort
In 1944, U.S. researchers conducted what is still considered to be the definitive study on human starvation. The goal was not to replicate the then-famine conditions of World War II Europe, but to scientifically isolate and examine the effects of hunger from various perspectives. The hope was that the information obtained would be used to alleviate suffering and death. Todd Tucker's compelling and provocative narrative of that experience, The Great Starvation Experiment: The Heroic Men Who Starved So That Millions Could Live, shows how three disparate groupsscientists, the U.S. military and the conscientious objectors who volunteered to be human guinea pigscollaborated for a "combination of national security, humanitarian, and scientific" reasons.
The idea for the project came from Dr. Ancel Keys, perhaps best known for the "K Ration" issued to U.S. troops during the war. Dr. Keys had used pacifist draftees, who were officially part of the Civilian Public Service, in other experiments. In the one Tucker writes about here, each man was to attain the normal weight for his height during the first three months of the experiment. In the second period, there would be six months of starvation with each man's diet cut in half, causing him to endure a 25 percent weight loss. Keys' goal was "nothing less than a complete cataloging of every quantifiable change that occurs in a famished human being," writes Tucker. The final three months, the rehabilitation periodwhat Tucker refers to as "the heart of the study"was concerned with recovery diets and recording the effects.
Tucker follows the volunteers through each phase, and we get to know several as individuals as they endure the grueling ordeal with varying degrees of physical and psychological deterioration. (One, Max Kampelman, impressively, completed his law school course and became an attorney while engaged in the experiment.) Of the original group of 36, 32 made it to the rehabilitation phase. Interviewed in later years, many said participating in the experiment was "the most important experience of their lives." For Keys, the most significant finding of the study was, Tucker writes, "that the human body was supremely well equipped to deal with starvation. . . . The human body was very, very tough."
The author enlightens us about the evolving history of conscientious objection in the U.S. Many CO's served as combat medics in World War II, including Desmond T. Doss, a devout Seventh-day Adventist, who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroic actions on Okinawa. Tucker also contrasts Keys' experiment, which used idealistic volunteers, with the horrible "medical experiments" conducted on unwilling victims in Nazi Germany and Japan and traces the attempts by the international medical community to deal with the abuse of human beings in such studies.
This well-searched and lucidly written account captures an important experiment little known to the general public. It is consistently compelling and provocative.
Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.