Sick Kids website must reflect immoral research on Indigenous children
Should history be rewritten when celebrated figures behaved in a manner opposite to the reason for which they are revered?
Dr. Frederick Tisdall, a physician, coinventor of Pablum, and director of the Nutritional Research Laboratories at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Kids, is celebrated on its website for his contribution to pediatric nutrition.
How does this deferential biography of a nutritionist compare with what was discovered about his unethical, immoral and arguably criminal experiments he conducted on malnourished Indigenous communities from 1942 until his death in 1949?
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 & 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 & 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.