Allen Hornblum, Judith Newman, and Gregory Dober chronicle the U.S. medical profession's experimentation on children from the 1950s to the 1970s. Doctors targeted children with low IQs, scientifically classifying them as “idiots,” “imbeciles,” and “morons,” occupying an intermediate point between animals and “normal” people. Long rendered invisible in mainstream U.S. society—figuratively in the press as well as literally confined in sanitariums—these children also existed on the margins of Cold War histories. Hornblum, Newman, and Dober seek to bring this shameful story into the larger historical narrative of the Cold War.
The first chapters contextualize eugenics in the twentieth century, showing how the field spread before and during the Second World War. Popular culture in the United States set doctors on a pedestal as heroes pushing the frontiers of medical knowledge. In contrast, the “Nazi doctors” received wide condemnation for their crimes against humanity, and the subsequent Nuremberg Code set forth...