June 11, 2001
"Monster Experiment" taught orphans to
stutter
The results of a covered up, 1939 children's experiment
demonstrates why AHRP calls for greater caution and mandatory
safeguards in research involving children--even non-invasive
research studies may cause children harm for life.
The San Jose Mercury News (below) found evidence and
victims of an unethical experiment that resulted in lifelong
emotional suffering. Institutionalized orphans in Iowa were
deliberately pressured psychologically to induce the children
to stutter--some had stuttered, others spoke fluently before
the experiment.
The experiment was designed and supervised by Dr. Wendell
Johnson who became one of the nation's most prominent speech
pathologists, and conducted under his supervision by a
graduate student.
The Mercury News reports that during the war years, some of
Johnson's graduate students were concerned about the ethics of
the orphan study. They had begun calling it the ``Monster
Experiment'' or the ``Monster Study.'' "They warned him that
in the aftermath of World War II, observers might draw
comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could
destroy his career."
``This was the kind of stuff you would think they were
doing in Auschwitz, and this is why, at that time, people
concealed it,'' said Franklin Silverman, a student of
Johnson's who became a professor of speech pathology at
Marquette University in Milwaukee. ``They wanted to block it
out of their minds and make believe it didn't happen.''
"Johnson was viewed as a god, the Monster Study suggested
that he had feet of clay,'' said Silverman, who reported on
the experiment in a 1988 speech pathology journal.
The graduate student investigator, Mary Tudor, is quoted
saying: "the pitiful part [was]... That I got them to trust
me, and then I did this horrible thing to them."
Today, unethical human experiments continue to be conducted
on vulnerable populations--including children.
Government-funded researchers expose children to trauma, pain
and risks of harm from invasive procedures that are against
their own best interest. For example, children are enduring
lumbar punctures just so that researchers can test one or
another speculative theory.
Then as now, researchers who violate ethical research
standards often gain professional prominence, not to mention
financial rewards. Then as now, adverse research results are
covered up by colleagues and institutions--the addition of
institutional review boards (in 1979) did not change the
culture of research cover up. There are currently no penalties
for conducting unethical experiments.
While steely Government bureaucrats talk about “No priority
is more important than the protection of patients,” they turn
their gaze from evidence of ethical violations and preventable
harm. They are deaf to the pleas of victims and their
families: "Fourteen years have past since my sister died. Has
anything been done? Did my sister, Becky Wright, die in vain?"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/front/docs/orphantwo11.htm
Published Monday, June 11, 2001, in the San Jose Mercury
News
Theory improved treatment and understanding of stuttering
Ethics concerns led researchers to conceal the experiment
Decades later, the experiment's victims struggle to make sense
of their past
BY JIM DYER Mercury News
By the summer of 1939, 12-year-old Mary Korlaske was
stuttering so badly that she thought it was fortunate that
Mary Tudor had given her speech therapy. She didn't know that
it hadn't been therapy at all.
Tudor had been a graduate student at the University of
Iowa, and Korlaske had been part of an experiment. The
experiment, on 22 children living at the Iowa Soldiers'
Orphans' Home in Davenport used psychological pressure to
induce children who spoke normally to stutter. It was designed
by one of the nation's most prominent speech pathologists, Dr.
Wendell Johnson, to test his theory on the cause of
stuttering.
Mary Korlaske remembers that she had thought her sessions
with Tudor were sponsored by the university to help her speak
better. She had also hoped the pretty graduate student would
become her new mom.
As her speech worsened, her behavior changed.
She remembers other orphans teasing her: ``Hey, Mmmmary.
Wwwwwhat's gggggoing on?'' Furious, she would strike out,
pummeling with her fists.
``She was always fighting kids,'' said Dolly Hamer Sweeney,
Mary's best friend at the orphanage. ``She didn't like to be
made fun of.'' Sweeney, now 75 and living in Southern
California, had a brother who stuttered and was included in
the experiment as part of a control group.
The more Mary fought, the more the children teased her. She
grew to hate the orphanage. Her grades fell. She rarely spoke.
She felt a ringing desperation to be alone. One day she found
a way to climb into the attic of her cottage. It was dark and
quiet. She sat for hours on the dusty planks, gazing out the
window at the other children.
That summer a boy made fun of classmate Dorothy Ossman's
stuttering, and Mary slugged him. The girls became instant
friends. Mary didn't know it, but 14-year-old Dorothy, who had
been a severe stutterer all her life, had been Case No. 9 in
the experiment.
Mary showed Dorothy her secret hideaway in the attic and it
became their refuge. They played with the old clothes stored
there, brought up fruit they raided from an orchard and
consoled each other.
Korlaske says she especially remembers one day in the
attic. That day, Dorothy was crying over the teasing. Mary
handed her friend a cherished keepsake her mother had given
her when she sent her away to the orphanage -- a silver
thimble, etched with forget-me-nots.
``It's my tiny cup for tears,'' she said. Dorothy said the
thimble wouldn't be big enough for the tears of both of them.
So Mary took it and rammed it against a nail protruding from a
beam. She showed Dorothy the hole in the bottom.
``Now it'll never overflow,'' she said. The girls laughed.
Attempt at a fix: Damage hard to reverse
After the experiment ended, Mary Tudor moved to Wisconsin.
Several months later, officials at the orphanage became
alarmed about the children's speech and contacted Wendell
Johnson.
Johnson asked Tudor to evaluate the children and to try to
reverse the effects of the experiment using positive therapy.
``If I possibly can, I want to go down to the orphanage
during Christmas vacation because I believe it would be very
interesting to see them after this length of time has
elapsed,'' Tudor replied in a letter in December 1939.
She finally managed the daylong trip in March 1940, and was
shocked by the deterioration of the children's speech,
especially that of 11-year-old Clarence Fifer and 15-year-old
Hazel Potter.
``I didn't find them as free from the effects of the
therapy I had inflicted upon them last year as I had hoped
to,'' she wrote to Johnson. ``But as I am still a firm
believer in the theory of evaluative labeling, I wasn't too
disappointed.''
Letters between Tudor and Johnson show she returned to the
orphanage two more times to attempt reverse therapy.
On Jan. 3, 1941, she received a final letter from Johnson.
The principal had told him that Hazel Potter, Case No. 16, had
left the orphanage, her speech ``quite bad.''
Tudor never made it back to the orphanage.
By spring, Mary Korlaske and Dorothy Ossman had given up
any hope of happiness at the orphanage or of escape through
adoption. So they decided to run away. Mary put on an old
shirt and pants she found in the attic, tucked her curly hair
under a baseball cap and ran off with her friend. They
hitchhiked west and then north to Mary's hometown of
Emmettsburg, where Mary found her mother.
``Keep the thimble to remember me,'' Mary remembers telling
Dorothy. ``I've got my mom back.''
The next day, Mary sat with her mother beside a lake north
of town and soaked up the afternoon, fishing and talking. She
didn't notice the men approaching.
``Are you Mary Korlaske?'' a police officer asked.
``No,'' Mary said, bolting up to run away. Her mother
gently grabbed her arm.
``Yes, she is,'' her mother told the officers.
The police took Mary away, to a county jail, and charged
her with being a runaway.
Later that day, officers brought in Dorothy Ossman on the
same charges.
Mary felt desolate at the thought of returning to the
orphanage. Dorothy tried to cheer her up. She reached into her
pocket, then handed her friend the silver thimble.
``In case you need it,'' Dorothy said.
The next day they learned the orphanage would not take them
back. Deemed chronic runaways because of Dorothy's history of
unsuccessful attempts, they were taken to a higher security
state training school for girls, where they spent the war
years.
A coverup: Methods questioned When the United States
entered World War II, Mary Tudor joined the Navy. She returned
to Iowa in 1945. After four years as a procurement officer,
she was eager to resume her career as a speech therapist.
Tudor looked forward to seeing Wendell Johnson again; she
hoped he would help her find a job. Six years earlier, she
remembered, he had grown increasingly excited over her
progress reports on the stuttering experiment. The research
supported his groundbreaking theory on the cause of
stuttering. Tudor had submitted her thesis before the war
broke out.
But when she contacted her adviser after the war, she found
the once warm and friendly man cold and dismissive.
``It was clear he didn't want me around,'' Tudor recalled.
``He was worried I'd tell somebody.''
During the war years, some of his graduate students,
concerned about the ethics of the orphan study, had begun
calling it the ``Monster Experiment'' or the ``Monster
Study.'' They warned him that although the experiment was
hardly unique in having used orphans as subjects, it was a
particularly sensitive time: In the aftermath of World War II,
observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human
subjects, which could destroy his career.
``This was the kind of stuff you would think they were
doing in Auschwitz, and this is why, at that time, people
concealed it,'' said Franklin Silverman, a student of
Johnson's who became a professor of speech pathology at
Marquette University in Milwaukee. ``They wanted to block it
out of their minds and make believe it didn't happen.''
The experiment had become an embarrassment to Johnson, said
Bill Trotter, a retired speech pathology professor at
Marquette who also studied under Johnson. ``I heard some of
the orphans didn't recover,'' he said. ``But I know Wendell
Johnson was an extremely ethical and moral person, and if
something happened to those children it was because of
something he did not foresee.''
Johnson's embarrassment collided with an overwhelming sense
of accomplishment for having obtained direct evidence for his
theory, said Dave Williams, a professor emeritus of
communicative disorders at Northern Illinois University, who
studied speech pathology under Johnson after the war.
``It was a very conflictive situation for him,'' said
Williams, a severe stutterer himself. ``He didn't know how to
react to it or handle it.''
It created a predicament. Publishing his theory that
calling attention to stuttering is one of the causes of the
disorder could help millions of children as well as elevate
his status in the world of speech pathology. But using the
experiment as direct evidence could destroy his career.
So Johnson never published Tudor's thesis nor mentioned it
in any of his writings. He forwarded his theory citing other,
indirect evidence: Anthropologists had reported that certain
Indian tribes had no word for stuttering and were more relaxed
about their children's speech development, and had no
stutterers.
``The Indian children were not criticized or evaluated on
the basis of their speech, no comments were made about it, no
issue was made of it,'' Johnson wrote in his seminal 1946 book
``People and Quandaries.''
By the late 1940s, his ``diagnosogenic theory'' became the
most widely accepted theory on the cause of stuttering. In
magazines and newspapers around the world, parents were
encouraged to let their children work out their speech
repetitions themselves and not draw attention to them.
Johnson corresponded with hundreds of people all over the
world who sought his advice. A severe stutterer for decades,
he had become quite fluent. He found he could speak in front
of crowds without stuttering, and his lectures on speech
problems attracted full houses across the country.
When he died in 1965 at the age of 59, thousands of letters
arrived in Iowa City celebrating his life's work. In 1968, the
University of Iowa founded the Wendell Johnson Speech and
Hearing Center, which remains one of the nation's leading
institutes for speech pathology and audiology.
``Wendell Johnson was a most revered and universally loved
man,'' said Dr. Duane Spriestersbach, a colleague and close
friend who gave Johnson's graveside eulogy.
Positive therapy: Applying the theory
When Mary Tudor found herself cold-shouldered by Johnson,
she took a job at the local veterans' hospital. Soon after,
she married and took up her career as a speech therapist
again.
For 34 years, she worked in school districts, first in Iowa
and later in California. She read Johnson's books and was one
of the many therapists who used his techniques.
In the experiment, Tudor had subjected half the children to
criticism to make them self-conscious about their speech,
eventually driving most of them to stutter. With the other
children -- those in control groups -- she used positive
therapy, supporting and encouraging them whether they spoke
fluently or not.
As a school speech therapist, Tudor used only the positive
therapy, she said. She would speak in a gentle, supportive
tone.
``You're doing so much better,'' she remembers telling a
quiet first-grader in Salinas in the early 1960s. ``You're
reading so well.''
``I know,'' he replied. ``You cured my voice.''
She found the therapy successful and taught teachers and
parents about Johnson's diagnosogenic theory. She never
mentioned the experiment.
But sometimes, she remembers, she would sit in a tiny chair
next to a child who was struggling to read aloud and be
reminded of the orphans who had sat across from her, wide-eyed
and eager to participate.
Ends vs. means: Assessing science
For years, Tudor, 84, had rationalized the experiment to
herself, saying it ultimately helped many people.
Then, three months ago, a letter and package arrived from
Mary Korlaske.
``I remember your face, how kind you were and you looked
like my mother,'' the letter said. ``But you were ther to
destroy my life.''
The letter, full of misspelled words seemingly scratched in
fits and bursts, called her ``monster'' and ``Nazi.''
Tudor was stunned. ``I don't like to be characterized as an
uncaring, cold person, because I'm not,'' she said.
``You see, it was an assignment for me. It was a different
world then. You did what you were told. If I got the same
assignment today, I wouldn't do it, now that I'm a mother and
grandmother.''
Tudor looks back at what happened in 1939 at the orphanage
as an aberration in her life.
For medical science, however, it was not an aberration. In
the early 1900s, physicians in North Carolina, Pennsylvania
and Ohio injected dozens of orphans with syphilis and
tuberculosis in experiments. Shortly before the stuttering
experiment, the University of Iowa conducted other studies at
the orphanage, including one that studied the effects of
stimulation deprivation on intelligence.
More widely known experiments used other kinds of
vulnerable patients without informing them. One of the most
notorious was the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, which ran from
1932 to 1972 and in which doctors in the U.S. Public Health
Service studying syphilis denied treatment to 399 poor black
sharecroppers so they could document the disease's
progression. In another government-sponsored study, 18
patients at various hospitals were injected with plutonium in
the late 1940s to see how the radioactive chemical spread
through the body.
When experts try to evaluate the ethical implications of
such experiments, they consider several elements: What was the
ultimate value of the experiment? How much harm did it cause
the subjects? What were the ethical standards for human
experimentation at the time? Was enough done to reverse the
negative effects?
A small circle of speech pathologists have been aware of
Johnson's stuttering experiment for many years. Most agree
that the ``Monster Study'' provided direct evidence for
Johnson's theory, which changed the way people regarded
stutterers and opened the door to effective therapies. But a
few reject the theory, in part because they find the
experiment's methodology imprecise and subjective.
Ehud Yairi, a professor of speech and hearing at the
University of Illinois and a former student of Johnson's, said
labeling someone a stutterer may worsen an existing problem,
but the objective data in the experiment did not support
Johnson's theory.
``There was a motivation to prove a theory,'' Yairi said,
speculating that some of Tudor's conclusions may have been
swayed by a desire to prove her adviser's theory.
Johnson's theory dominated until the 1970s, when speech
pathologists began to reexamine its premise. Anthropologists
had discovered that those Indian tribes not only had words for
stuttering, but also had stutterers. Meanwhile, some
therapists had noticed that some children continued to stutter
even though no one criticized their speech.
Gradually, Johnson's theory fell out of favor and speech
pathologists began moving back to organic causes to explain
stuttering.
Even today, though, Johnson's theory underlies the widely
held view that positive reinforcement is the best therapy for
children with speech problems.
For the past decade, a handful of speech pathologists who
know about the experiment and support Johnson's theory as one
explanation for stuttering have started to think it might be
necessary to publicize the experiment. They fear that a
growing number of experts want to revert to the idea that
stuttering is inborn and therefore that it is best to make
children acutely aware of their speech problems.
But they are torn: Revealing the truth in order to save
Johnson's theory could prove costly to his reputation.
``Johnson was viewed as a god, the Monster Study suggested
that he had feet of clay,'' said Silverman, who reported on
the experiment in a 1988 speech pathology journal. ``The study
should not have been done. But since it was done and someone
could benefit from the research, we should utilize it.''
Many are troubled that Johnson -- a man plagued by
stuttering his entire life -- would see the need to induce it
in children, especially orphans.
Scientifically, using the orphanage for research was
advantageous because it supplied a large, homogeneous group of
children. Moreover, Johnson didn't need parental permission --
something that probably would have been denied.
``I think it's not coincidental that he chose to do it with
a group of parentless kids,'' said Tricia Zebrowski, 45, an
assistant professor at the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing
Center in Iowa, who heads the speech pathology and audiology
program established by Johnson. ``This was the only way he was
going to get kids.''
Johnson's prolific writing provides little insight into his
thoughts on using the orphans. There are almost three dozen
boxes of Johnson's records stored at the University of Iowa
library, including his opinions on subjects from politics to
soil erosion, and wide-ranging correspondence with such
luminaries as Albert Einstein.
Yet the box filled with meticulously alphabetized files of
graduate students who worked under him includes no file on
Mary Tudor. His 1939 journal mentions his meetings with Tudor
and his trip to the orphanage to witness the final
assessments, but nothing more. Anything else he may have
written about the experiment could not be found.
In the same journal, Johnson wrote about his concern that
his son would become a stutterer. His son was 5 years old --
almost the same age as the youngest orphan induced to stutter
in the experiment. ``Bothered by the thought Nicky will notice
and imitate my repetitions,'' he wrote.
Now a law professor at the University of Iowa, Nicholas
Johnson, who does not stutter, would not discuss what his
father might have thought about the orphans. Standards were
different in the 1930s, he said. His father was universally
beloved, and when he died, thousands of people from around the
world who benefited from his therapy sent letters to his
family, he said.
And Mary Tudor doesn't know how her professor regarded the
treatment of the orphans. ``I don't know why Wendell Johnson
didn't send a therapist from the university over to the
orphanage,'' she said. ``They needed therapy to lose that
fear, or the psychological effects could be long-lasting.
Wendell Johnson would know that you couldn't reverse it in
three sessions of positive therapy.''
Reversing both the stuttering and the anxiety and isolation
stemming from stuttering is much more difficult than creating
it, said Chandler Screven, a former professor of childhood
psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Screven, who studied under Johnson, likened the orphans'
dilemma to that of laboratory rats that receive electric
shocks when they hear a buzzer and jump over a barrier in
response. Once the animals have been conditioned to jump,
those connections remain in their brains. Over time, they may
fade, but all it takes is a traumatic event -- a trigger --
and they quickly resurface.
``The original connections,'' he said, ``are always
there.''
In assessing the harm caused by Johnson's experiment, some
experts point out that it is hard to separate the damage
caused by being labeled stutterers from that caused by other
adversities the orphans faced, such as severe poverty, the
loss of a parent, a childhood in an institution.
For Duane Spriestersbach, a close colleague of Johnson who
went on to become a professor of speech pathology and
disorders of the ear, nose and throat at the University of
Iowa, the orphan experiment was both justified and ethical.
``It was a different time and the values were different,''
he said. ``Today we might disagree with what he did, but in
those days it was fully within the norms of the time.''
In fact, in its 1936 biennial report, the Iowa State Board
of Control, which oversaw all state institutions, openly
encouraged and reported on cooperation with the University of
Iowa in conducting research using children in various
institutions.
But Susan E. Lederer, a medical historian and author of
``Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America
before the Second World War,'' said there were numerous codes
regarding such experimentation at that time. ``There were
implicit rules, if not explicit rules, in place, particularly
when it comes to inducing a pathology in children.''
James Holmes, superintendent of the orphanage in Davenport
in the 1950s and 1960s, was appalled when he heard about
Johnson's experiment. ``The state must have known about it,''
Holmes said. He, too, had approved research at the orphanage
conducted by the university, but he was required to inform the
state board of control and ensure that he would follow up on
the research.
Zebrowski, who refers to the orphan experiment in her
courses on stuttering therapy and research, said that
Johnson's work made a great contribution by showing that
stuttering results from a complex interaction of internal and
external factors, and that the desperation to avoid stuttering
can make the problem worse.
``Anybody who knows of it or hears about it now would
interpret it as a harmful study, that these people were sort
of monsters to these little kids,'' she said. ``No, it wasn't
ethical. Do I know why he did it? No. Do I think he was a bad
person? No. I just think it was the culture at the time.''
``The real litmus test,'' she said, ``is what happened to
those children.''
A traumatic event: Relapse triggered The trigger for Mary
Korlaske Nixon came in 1999 when, two days before New Year's
Day, her husband died.
She had met him in Iowa in 1954, where she settled after a
decade of wandering from state to state. He was a tall,
outgoing man who never made fun of her speech or lack of
education. He encouraged her to socialize.
``I'm proud of you,'' she remembers him telling her.
``Don't let people put you down.''
They married and raised three children. Her speech
improved. She forgot about the orphanage. She remembers her
life with him as 45 years of happiness.
Then he died, and she started to stutter again.
Her oldest son, Jimmy Madden of San Bruno, grew worried.
``I didn't know what was wrong,'' he said. ``She had
problems talking before sometimes but this was bad.''
She tried applying the techniques Mary Tudor had taught her
at the orphanage during the experiment, techniques she had
been told were therapeutic. She stopped, took a deep breath.
She placed her tongue on the roof of her mouth. They didn't
help.
She began to withdraw. She moved into the Iowa Veterans
Home in Marshalltown and placed a ``Do Not Disturb'' sign on
her door. She stocked her room with food, crafts, soda and
videotapes, and for months she rarely left.
``When she first came here, she said, `I'm a loner and my
room is my private place,' '' said Doug Moberly, a social
worker at the home.
Last year in May, at her granddaughter's wedding in Palo
Alto, she sat in the far corner of the hotel's reception hall.
``When can I go home?'' she repeatedly asked her son.
At Christmas, she could endure only about five minutes of
the annual party before she returned to her room.
``I don't know what's wrong with me,'' she told a reporter
who visited her during the first week of January.
A revelation: Anger, sorrow, relief According to Mary
Tudor's records, the last time anyone contacted the orphans in
connection with the experiment was August 1940, when Tudor
made her last visit to the orphanage. Six decades later, a
search that began with her records identified 20 of the 22
orphans, of whom at least 13 are still alive.
They had never heard about the experiment. When the Mercury
News told them, most became angered by the experiment. Some
responded stoically. Others cried.
``Oh, dear God,'' said Donna Hughes Collings of Des Moines,
who had been a normal speaker in a control group and therefore
suffered no damage. Her husband held her while he lambasted
the people responsible, comparing them to the Nazis saying,
``The end never justifies the means.''
Others just stared, incredulous. ``Why? Why would they do
that to us?'' asked Ralph Fry of Nora Springs, Iowa. He had
been a stutterer, was placed in a control group and given
positive therapy, and his speech improved.
Some were not surprised.
``We knew they were experimenting on us,'' said Hazel
Potter Dornbush, 77, of Fulton, Ill. At 15 years of age,
Hazel, a normal speaker induced to stutter, had been one of
the oldest subjects. ``Every week somebody else from the
university would come and start testing us for God knows
what.''
Others, like Robert Hamer, 73, of Waterloo, Iowa, listened
long and hard before commenting. He was a stutterer included
in a control group and retained somewhat halting speech.
``They might not have known the negative effects beforehand,''
he said. ``If they knew, then it was wrong.''
Jane Ann Pugh Fleming, a normal speaker who had been in a
control group and now lives in Milwaukee, at first refused to
listen to anything about the experiment. ``I don't even want
to know,'' she said, shaking her hand in front of her face and
ushering the reporter out of her home.
For her younger sister, Norma Jean Pugh, learning about the
experiment came as an epiphany. At 6, she had spoken fluently,
but was induced to stutter in the experiment. She suffered for
years, wondering why she found it so hard t o be with people.
``At least I know it's not me,'' she said. Now going by the
name Kathryn Meacham, she moved from foster family to foster
family during her childhood, repeatedly rejected because they
considered her a misfit and slow in school. She remembers how
classmates teased her about her stuttering.
``My speech bothered me as a young child,'' she said. ``The
kids were cruel.''
Now 68, she lives as a recluse in her tiny town of Linden,
Iowa, the one who never attends high school reunions, who
never leaves her home, who rarely talks to anyone except her
children.
When Mary Korlaske Nixon was told about the experiment, she
was stunned. She stared, her smoky blue eyes fixed on every
word.
Of the six normal speakers induced to stutter, she retained
the most noticeable speech repetitions. She has difficulty
with words that begin with ``s'' and sometimes repeats words
in her sentences. When she is nervous, her words jumble and
she struggles to get them out.
``It's affected me right now,'' she said. ``I don't like to
read out loud because I'm afraid of making a mistake. I don't
like talking to people because of saying the wrong word.''
The orphanage ``was a cruel place, but I didn't realize
they was pulling that on me.''
She remembered many of the children in the experiment,
including her friend Dorothy, who died last year, and Marian
Higdon, who she learned had been her control group
counterpart.
``I don't like what they did to me, but I'm glad it was
me,'' she said. ``Marian might not have been able to handle
it. I'm a fighter. I'll make them pay for what they did to
us.''
Love and betrayal: A reminder in the mail
Mary Korlaske Nixon called a lawyer. She started contacting
some orphans who were in the experiment. She called the
University of Iowa to request a copy of Tudor's unpublished
thesis and current address.
She wondered, though, if any legal action would be resolved
before she dies, and if she would ever again meet Mary Tudor,
the woman she had once thought would be her new mother.
So, one night in early March, she took a pen and wrote a
letter. She wrote about love and betrayal, about hope and
despair, about God and forgiveness. Her bitterness spilled
out.
She enclosed the letter with a small package wrapped in
tissue and white medical tape.
A few days later, it arrived 1,700 miles away in the East
Bay town of Moraga.
``Did you get married? Did you have children? Are they
insignificant?'' the letter said. ``Why experiment on orphans,
we have all ready had enough problems, and was unwanted. I
have nothing left. You stolen my life away from me.
``As I sit her crying . . . I wondered what I could say or
send you to remind you of the hurtful pain that never goes
away.
``I'm sending you your own thimble.
``God try to have mercy, or should he? You had no mercy for
the children who still cry in the night.
``-- Mary Korlaske Nixon Case No. 15
``P.S. When the tears get realy bad, punch a whole in the
bottom of the thimble like I did. Then the thimble won't over
flow.''
Mary Tudor, who so often had struggled with the right and
wrong of that experiment so long ago, quietly set the letter
down on her dining room table. She carried the package into
the kitchen, pulled out scissors from a drawer, and began
cutting through the medical tape.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---- Contact Jim Dyer at jdyer@sjmercury.com or at (408)
278-3464.
© 2000 The Mercury News.
