PUBLISHER'S NOTE: "The hospital's failure to take down it's web-site (As of 11.15 AM on Thursday July 26, 2018), until this glaring, ugly, omission is addressed sends out a terrible, uncaring message: a troubling message from the Hospital that brought us Dr. Charles Smith and Motherisk, Lisa Shore, Sanchia Bulgin, and all too many more black spots. This Leopard clearly has not changed its spots. Bravo to Prof. MacKenzie and her conscientious students.
Harold Levy: Publisher. The Toronto Star.
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PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: "A reply by Janice Nicholson, Director of Communications & Digital Media, stated that the hospital was aware of Mosby's research: "While we have been aware of this history since the outset of recent efforts, our delay in communicating about it has been due to our commitment to not only acknowledge truths, but to also ensure acknowledgments are accompanied by tangible actions on the path of reconciliation. We are confident that our ongoing work will alleviate the concerns voiced by your students."
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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "With
the consent of my students, I emailed a letter to Sick Kids stating the
students' concerns and asked why the webpage did not reflect the
five-year-old research by Mosby. A reply by Janice Nicholson, Director
of Communications & Digital Media, stated that the hospital was
aware of Mosby's research: "While
we have been aware of this history since the outset of recent efforts,
our delay in communicating about it has been due to our commitment to
not only acknowledge truths, but to also ensure acknowledgments are
accompanied by tangible actions on the path of reconciliation. We are
confident that our ongoing work will alleviate the concerns voiced by
your students." While
the class agreed that words are meaningless without actions, they were
confused about the time frame. Why not take down the webpage until Sick
Kids figured out the path of reconciliation? Or
add a paragraph acknowledging the suffering Tisdall foisted on a
vulnerable population and state their intention going forward as a
research hospital is to promote healing and then enumerate what that
means? In the meantime, the webpage still stands as a testimony to
Tisdall's great achievements but none of his failures to humanity. "
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STORY: "Sick Kids website must reflect immoral research on Indigenous children," by Peggy McKenzie, published by The Toronto Star on July 26, 2018. (Peggy
Mackenzie is a professor in the Department of English and Communication
and School of Liberal Arts Sciences at George Brown College.)
GIST: "A Department of National Health and Welfare nurse supervises the taking of saliva samples from boys at the Indian School in Port Alberni, B.C. as part of a decade-long series of nutritional experiments conducted on Indigenous children in the 1940s by the Canadian government. (Library and Archives Canada. In late May, students in the Introduction to Research class at George Brown College studied research ethics — their importance when conducting research studies, and how all academic research in Canada must follow the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans or TCPS2. They also studied egregious cases when ethics — and humanity — went missing. To illustrate why there is a specific section on the TCPS2 website dealing with "Research Involving Aboriginal Peoples in Canada," we discussed the explosive research findings by food historian, Dr. Ian Mosby in 2013. Mosby uncovered nutrition experiments from 1942-1952 that spread from involuntary test subjects on reserves in northern Manitoba and James Bay to vulnerable children warehoused in six residential schools across Canada. Indigenous children were deliberately starved, milk rations were halved, essential vitamins and dental services were withheld. The government-run experiment spanned the entire country and involved at least 1,300 Indigenous people, most of them children. Tisdall
was the lead researcher for the secretive nutritional experiments
conducted in the northern communities. Dozens of media outlets
interviewed Mosby in 2013 and Canadians learned about one of the worst
breaches of medical ethics in Canadian history. Imagine
my students' surprise when they took my lecture a step further and
googled Tisdall. They found the glowing Sick Kids' webpage dedicated to
the role he played in nutrition science. No mention is made of his
well-known experiments on an unsuspecting and beleaguered population. A
followup article by three physicians in the journal Pediatrics and Child Health in 2014 further argued Mosby's assertion that
Tisdall should have known his actions were unconscionable in 1942, and
definitely by 1947 with the publication of the Nuremberg Code that covers medical research. The
code resulted from the Nuremberg trial for 23 defendants — 20 of them
physicians — who had used prisoners from Nazi concentration camps for
medical experimentation. The article,
"Canada's shameful history of nutrition research on residential
schoolchildren: The need for strong medical ethics in Aboriginal health
research," compared the research on the Indigenous community to the
"medical atrocities performed in the name of science," by the Nazi
physicians put on trial. With
the consent of my students, I emailed a letter to Sick Kids stating the
students' concerns and asked why the webpage did not reflect the
five-year-old research by Mosby. A reply by Janice Nicholson, Director
of Communications and Digital Media, stated that the hospital was
aware of Mosby's research: "While
we have been aware of this history since the outset of recent efforts,
our delay in communicating about it has been due to our commitment to
not only acknowledge truths, but to also ensure acknowledgments are
accompanied by tangible actions on the path of reconciliation. We are
confident that our ongoing work will alleviate the concerns voiced by
your students." While
the class agreed that words are meaningless without actions, they were
confused about the time frame. Why not take down the webpage until Sick
Kids figured out the path of reconciliation? Or
add a paragraph acknowledging the suffering Tisdall foisted on a
vulnerable population and state their intention going forward as a
research hospital is to promote healing and then enumerate what that
means? In the meantime, the webpage still stands as a testimony to Tisdall's great achievements but none of his failures to humanity. "
---------------------------------------------------------
To access the Hospital For Sick Children website - which at 10.15 AM this morning (Thursday July 26, 2018) still made no reference to the late Dr. Tisdall's infamous experiments conducted on indigenous infants as is the subject of the above commentary - go to the link below: (The hospital's article on Dr. Tisdall is in a section of SickKids website called "Hospital; About SickKids; History and Milestones"..."Frederick Tisdall."..."When a young doctor named Frederick Tisdall first came to The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in 1921 no one could have imagined what accomplishments would follow. In late 1929, Dr. Tisdall came into prominence when he became director of the Nutritional Research Laboratories. He was described as 'dynamic', a 'wheeler-dealer', a 'cleaver business man', and a 'publicity genius'. The most pressing problem facing the hard working staff of the laboratory was preparing good nutritious food for babies. At that time, infants were being fed cereal and biscuits consisting mostly of wheat, oats or corn meal. All the bran and germ had to be removed because whole grain cereal was difficult for a baby to digest. Dr. Tisdall, along with Dr. Theodore Drake, made the production of a perfect infant food their main goal. They intensified and expanded their experiments with animals, and tested foods on groups of children in the hospital and in orphanages. All the hard work paid off when the doctors discovered how to make a mixture that contained all the essential vitamins and minerals that babies needed, yet wouldn't cause undue constipation or diarrhea. They added ingredients such as honey to make it more palatable and baked it into a biscuit, which they arranged to have manufactured by a prominent biscuit company under the name "Sunwheat." But they weren't done yet! They realized that tiny babies can't eat biscuits. A cereal was needed that could be mixed with milk and spoon fed. So they produced a cereal that had many of the same ingredients as the biscuits. For three months, babies and older children in the hospital were fed the mixture. They liked it, they didn't become constipated, and their health improved. But the cereal had one serious drawback -- it required lengthy cooking. At that time, the practice of drying milk by letting it drip on a red-hot revolving drum and immediately scraping it off was coming into use. The researchers tried this technique with their cooked cereal and it worked. The mixture came off the drum as a bone-dry, flaky powder. Now they had a baby food that filled their requirements and would keep indefinitely. They called it "Pablum". Tisdall recognized he had the perfect product and was determined to find the best way to market it to benefit children everywhere. This is where his keen business sense came into play. He got in touch with the executives of the Mead Johnson Company in Chicago and arranged to meet with them. After much discussion, an arrangement was worked out. In return for the permission to manufacture Pablum, SickKids would receive a royalty on every box sold. It turned out to be an excellent deal for many years. Pablum largely financed further research for the hospital. During his time at SickKids, Tisdall was the author of The Home Care of the Infant and Child and co-author with Alan Brown of the textbook Common Procedures in the Practice of Paediatrics . He also published more than 125 scientific articles, most on the subject of nutrition. He was chairman of committees on nutrition for the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Red Cross, a member of the Canadian Council on Nutrition, the Food and Nutrition Board, National Research Council, Washington, and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada. One day after assisting in the laying of the cornerstone of the new hospital on University Avenue, Frederick Tisdall died suddenly at the age of 56. At the time of his death, Tisdall was associate professor of Paediatrics, University of Toronto, a physician at SickKids, and director of Research Laboratories, Department of Paediatrics, at SickKids."
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http://www.sickkids.ca/aboutsickkids/history-and-milestones/our-history/frederick-tisdall.html
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The entire commentary can be read at:
https://www-thestar-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.thestar.com/amp/opinion/contributors/2018/07/22/sick-kids-website-must-reflect-immortal-research-on-indigenous-children.html?amp_js_v=0.1&usqp=mq331AQGCAEoATgA#origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.ca&prerenderSize=1&visibilityState=prerender&paddingTop=54&p2r=0&horizontalScrolling=0&csi=1&aoh=15326098028738&viewerUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.ca%2Famp%2Fs%2Fwww.thestar.com%2Famp%2Fopinion%2Fcontributors%2F2018%2F07%2F22%2Fsick-kids-website-must-reflect-immortal-research-on-indigenous-children.html&history=1&storage=1&cid=1&cap=swipe%2CnavigateTo%2Ccid%2Cfragment%2CreplaceUrl---------------------------------------------------------
To access the Hospital For Sick Children website - which at 10.15 AM this morning (Thursday July 26, 2018) still made no reference to the late Dr. Tisdall's infamous experiments conducted on indigenous infants as is the subject of the above commentary - go to the link below: (The hospital's article on Dr. Tisdall is in a section of SickKids website called "Hospital; About SickKids; History and Milestones"..."Frederick Tisdall."..."When a young doctor named Frederick Tisdall first came to The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in 1921 no one could have imagined what accomplishments would follow. In late 1929, Dr. Tisdall came into prominence when he became director of the Nutritional Research Laboratories. He was described as 'dynamic', a 'wheeler-dealer', a 'cleaver business man', and a 'publicity genius'. The most pressing problem facing the hard working staff of the laboratory was preparing good nutritious food for babies. At that time, infants were being fed cereal and biscuits consisting mostly of wheat, oats or corn meal. All the bran and germ had to be removed because whole grain cereal was difficult for a baby to digest. Dr. Tisdall, along with Dr. Theodore Drake, made the production of a perfect infant food their main goal. They intensified and expanded their experiments with animals, and tested foods on groups of children in the hospital and in orphanages. All the hard work paid off when the doctors discovered how to make a mixture that contained all the essential vitamins and minerals that babies needed, yet wouldn't cause undue constipation or diarrhea. They added ingredients such as honey to make it more palatable and baked it into a biscuit, which they arranged to have manufactured by a prominent biscuit company under the name "Sunwheat." But they weren't done yet! They realized that tiny babies can't eat biscuits. A cereal was needed that could be mixed with milk and spoon fed. So they produced a cereal that had many of the same ingredients as the biscuits. For three months, babies and older children in the hospital were fed the mixture. They liked it, they didn't become constipated, and their health improved. But the cereal had one serious drawback -- it required lengthy cooking. At that time, the practice of drying milk by letting it drip on a red-hot revolving drum and immediately scraping it off was coming into use. The researchers tried this technique with their cooked cereal and it worked. The mixture came off the drum as a bone-dry, flaky powder. Now they had a baby food that filled their requirements and would keep indefinitely. They called it "Pablum". Tisdall recognized he had the perfect product and was determined to find the best way to market it to benefit children everywhere. This is where his keen business sense came into play. He got in touch with the executives of the Mead Johnson Company in Chicago and arranged to meet with them. After much discussion, an arrangement was worked out. In return for the permission to manufacture Pablum, SickKids would receive a royalty on every box sold. It turned out to be an excellent deal for many years. Pablum largely financed further research for the hospital. During his time at SickKids, Tisdall was the author of The Home Care of the Infant and Child and co-author with Alan Brown of the textbook Common Procedures in the Practice of Paediatrics . He also published more than 125 scientific articles, most on the subject of nutrition. He was chairman of committees on nutrition for the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Red Cross, a member of the Canadian Council on Nutrition, the Food and Nutrition Board, National Research Council, Washington, and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada. One day after assisting in the laying of the cornerstone of the new hospital on University Avenue, Frederick Tisdall died suddenly at the age of 56. At the time of his death, Tisdall was associate professor of Paediatrics, University of Toronto, a physician at SickKids, and director of Research Laboratories, Department of Paediatrics, at SickKids."
-------------------------------------------------------
http://www.sickkids.ca/aboutsickkids/history-and-milestones/our-history/frederick-tisdall.html
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this
case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on
developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than
twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the
harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into
pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system.
The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related
to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/
