Content warning: This essay discusses the medical abuse of incarcerated people.
Between 1951 and 1974, people incarcerated at Holmesburg Prison, operated by the city of Philadelphia, were subject to several scientific experiments by University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Dr. Albert Kligman.
At the beginning of this year, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia formally apologized for the experiments performed on mostly Black inmates. URL Media partner WURD Radio broke the story, reading the apology live on air.
“The culture of the prison system had grown accustomed to this practice that made the Philly prison system the Kmart of human experimentation in America,” Allen Hornblum, author of “Acres of Skin,” a book about the experiments, told WURD Radio’s Nick Taliaferro after the apology came out.
From the experiments, Kligman and the University of Pennsylvania produced cosmetic and pharmaceutical items like perfume, shampoo, baby products, liquid diets, and the popular acne product Retin-A.
While it has been widely discussed how Kligman’s experiments impacted men incarcerated at the prison — including being injected with, slathered in and made to ingest unknown substances, as URL Media partner Prism reported — incarcerated women were also subjected to these medical experiments.
At an October event held at the University of Pennsylvania, the first to take place at the campus about the experiments, Dorothy Alston spoke about her experience as an incarcerated person who participated in Kligman’s research.
Alston said at the event that she was motivated to participate in the study as the money would have financially supported her and her family. “This diet food test consisted of eating three sets of meals daily and being consistently weighed throughout the three-week testing period.”
Alston then signed up for a second experiment where she was given psychedelic pills, an experiment that she immediately knew was not right for her after taking it.
“I was zooming around like I was in an airplane,” she recalled.
But it was the final experiment, the “tampon test,” that forever changed the trajectory of Alston’s life — leading to the end of her marriage following a hysterectomy to remove the remnants of a defective tampon that remained in her uterus years following the experiment. Alston said she was paid $15 for her participation.
“When they mention Holmesburg, they only think that it’s a male institution,” Alston said. “But there are other prisons that are connected to Holmesburg—there’s the Detention Center and the House of Correction, where I was at.”
And though the number of surviving participants continues to shrink, they, along with their families, are still pushing for reparations for the harms they endured, something Hornblum said makes sense.
“They were used in a wholesale fashion as if they were dogs or lab rats or laboratory material and they have a very good argument to make,” Hornblum said. “If Kligman made millions, if Penn made millions, if Johnson & Johnson made millions, why the hell can’t some of the individuals who were used to develop those products get something out of it as well?”
As for the prison, it was decommissioned and closed in 1995. But the pain and suffering of those who were part of the experiments and their descendants continues.
“I’m a living example of what this man, this medical professional, did to me,” Alston said. “Don’t make this mistake and do it to somebody else.” — Alicia Ramirez
Uplift. Respect. Love.
