Canada’s shameful history of nutrition research on residential school children: The need for strong

medical ethics in Aboriginal health research

A highly unethical nutrition experiments performed on Canadian Aboriginal children at six residential schools between 1942 and 1952 (2) – our own medical
atrocities. The experiments were performed by the Department of Indian Affairs of Canada under the direction of two physicians: Dr Percy Moore, the Indian
Affairs Branch Superintendent of Medical Services, and Dr Frederick Tisdall, a famed nutritionist, a former president of the Canadian Paediatric Society and one
of three paediatricians at The Hospital for Sick Children (Toronto, Ontario) who developed Pablum infant cereal in the 1930s.

In these experiments, parents were not informed, nor were consents obtained. Even as children died, the experiments continued. Even after the
recommendations from the Nuremberg trial, these experiments continued.

In these experiments, control and treatment groups of malnourished children were denied adequate nutrition. In one experiment, the treatment group received
supplements of riboflavin, thiamine and/or ascorbic acid supplements to determine whether these mitigated the problems – they did not. In another, children
were given a flour mix containing added thiamine, riboflavin, niacin and bone meal. Rather than improving nutrition, the children became more anemic, likely
contributing to more deaths and certainly impacting development. In these experiments, efforts were made to control as many factors as possible, even when
they harmed the research subjects. For example, previously available dental care was denied in some settings because the researchers wanted to observe the
state of dental caries and gingivitis with malnutrition.

Similar to the US Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskeegee (3) – which, in 1932, set out with the “best of intentions” to learn about the natural history of
syphilis among black men in hopes of justifying a treatment program for them – Canadian researchers used Aboriginal children in residential schools to learn
about malnutrition. The problem in Tuskeegee (Alabama) was that the natural history observations continued long after penicillin became available to treat
syphilis. In Canada’s case, the basics of alleviating malnutrition (adequate food) were well known even before these experiments began. The most striking fact is
that both studies were performed among individuals who were already marginalized and vulnerable. No one was looking out for the best interests of these
research subjects. They had no voice.