I came across this photograph last week and I decided to buy it.

This is an original press photo dated 12/1/1961 that appeared in the Chicago Sun Times with the following caption:

One of the convicts who exposed himself to malaria sits in a hospital bed at Stateville and takes a pill that may cure him of malaria.

I was intrigued by this history since I know nothing about it. Some quick internet research led me to an article by Bernard Harcourt titled “Making Willing Bodies” which documents a history of the University of Chicago’s medical experimentation on prisoners at Stateville.

In 1944, 432 Stateville prisoners were infected mosquitoes carrying the most virulent strain of malaria under the supervision of medical researchers from the University of Chicago. Harcourt (2011) describes the process:

The first “bite day” was March 8, 1944. The procedure took longer than expected. The plan was to bite sixteen prisoners on that first day, and “each man had to have the same number of first bites, second bites, and third bites” (Leopold 1974:310). Each mosquito was in a little cylindrical cage that was placed up to the skin of the inmate: “You took a mosquito, placed its cage on A’s forearm and watched carefully until the mosquito bit him. Then, when you were sure that the mosquito had inserted its proboscis well under the skin, but before it had had a chance to fill up with blood, you lifted the cage gently from A’s arm and placed it on B’s. Here, too, the mosquito must have a chance to bite, but not to fill up with blood. Then you placed the cage on C’s arm, and here you let the mosquito ‘bite out’— drink its fill” (Leopold 1974:310).

Easier said than done. Many of the mosquitoes did not cooperate, others were not sufficiently infected after dissection, and so it took until 3 a.m. that first day to get the job done—with all the doctors and researchers gradually leaving, eventually letting a single doctor finish with the assistance of Nathan Leopold, the notorious Stateville inmate of Leopold and Loeb infamy, who would participate actively in the human experiments as lab technician, as researcher, and as volunteer. In all, each of the inmates “received the bites of ten infected mosquitoes” (Alving et al. 1948:3; Leopold 1974:310-11).

Each of the prisoners who participated in the study signed a “consent” form. The initial cohort of prisoners who participated in the study were white and had to submit to a battery of medical tests. The impact of the medical experimentation on prisoners is contested history:

According to the official story and the news media, none of the Stateville prisoners suffered fatal harm as a result of the malaria experiments. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported that “None of the volunteering convicts died but many were made violently ill as a result of their infection with vivax malaria and subsequent treatment with drugs then in the experimental stage” (Howard 1947:10). Leopold’s memoir, though, tells a slightly different story and does include at least one inmate death directly associated with the testing of antimalarial drugs (1974:320). For the rest of the inmates, the experiments tended to be extremely painful. The malaria was a virulent strand, one of the most potent. When Leopold had it, he claimed, it caused headaches “unlike any other headache in the world. You think from moment to moment that your head is going to split, and you wish to gosh it would!” (1974:321).

As the historian Nathaniel Comfort notes, “No longitudinal study was performed on the Stateville prisoners to assess the long-term effects of these regimens. Heart failure is now a known side effect of some synthetic antimalarials. Leopold suffered two heart attacks while on the malaria project and eventually died of heart failure in 1974” (Comfort 2009:195).

Harcourt (2011) makes that case that some of the prisoners who participated in this study saw themselves as contributing the war effort. They saw themselves as “good soldiers.” The University of Chicago Malaria study ended in the mid-1970s when the country decided to stop using prisoners for medical experimentation. Harcourt writes: “Since then, we no longer inflict disease intentionally on sacrificial bodies—even with their formal consent. Human subjects committees and institutional review boards now police that domain of research and ensure that human subjects are not treated like laboratory animals (p.7).”

Harcourt compares the prisoners who “consented” to participate in these medical experiments at Stateville under coercive conditions with the young soldiers who were conscripted to serve during World War II under threat of incarceration. He offers interesting ideas about the true nature of “consent” specifically with respect to the use of our bodies by the State.

Many reading this might want to ask why prisoners would “willingly” subject themselves to painful medical experimentation. Harcourt invites the reader to reframe that question:

Rather, the question to ask is how the prisoners’ apparent willingness to catch malaria was achieved. How was their consent fabricated? And here, the answer turns out to be somewhat less remarkable than expected: by the ordinary means of governance, by associating the sacrifice of the body to citizenship and country, by raising the national flag, by framing everything through the lens of the war effort; by investing these prisoners and soldiers in their own destiny, nurturing them, and turning them into entrepreneurs of their own will (Foucault 2004:232-36); by joining “the care and governing of the polity to the care and governing of the affective self” (Stoler 2009:71).17 It is a device that is, as we have seen, extremely productive.

What this episode illustrates is the State’s immense power to get us to ” manufacture consent.” Harcourt expands on this idea:

“The implications, though, are stunning—in two significant ways. Stunning, first, because, if consent can be achieved within Stateville prison, surely it can be achieved anywhere. If we can convince ourselves that these inmates volunteered and that their consent was legitimate—despite the fact that they were in formally coercive conditions— then it must not be hard to manufacture consent elsewhere. And not surprisingly, we do. We produce willingness in our everyday lives—willingness to accept the daily and banal routines of service, work, family life, and citizenship. Like the prisoners at Stateville, we make ourselves feel the need to sacrifice ourselves—to serve, to abide, to agree—by associating self-sacrifice with fidelity, devotion, citizenship, and patriotism. These associations—of sacrifice and family, work, country, or beyond that, humanity—are the techniques of governance that produce willing subjects. They help produce experimental subjects in prisons, at the extremity of consent-making; but they also produce daily acts of submission. The new mother who stops working in order to follow her husband or care for her children; the act of childbearing itself, as a sacrifice of one’s body for one’s family; the wage-earner who accepts a night shift or takes a second job to provide more for his or her children; the taxpayer who pays for things she really does not believe in, like war, sex education or abstinence programs—all of the sacrifices that we make in our daily lives, how often they are placed within the rubric of fidelity to family, to political community, to country (p. 17).”

Read the whole article, it is extremely interesting and thought-provoking.