The Great Starvation Experiment: The Heroic Men Who Starved so That Millions Could Live PDF

Rating: Author: Todd Tucker ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDF

Free download PRETITLE The Great Starvation Experiment: The Heroic Men Who Starved so That Millions Could Live [Kindle Edition] POSTTITLE from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link What does it feel like to starve? To feel your body cry out for nourishment, to think only of food? How many fitful, hungry nights must pass before dreams of home-cooked meals metastasize into nightmares of cannibalism? Why would anyone volunteer to find out?

In The Great Starvation Experiment, historian Todd Tucker tells the harrowing story of thirty-six young men who willingly and bravely faced down profound, consuming hunger. As conscientious objectors during World War II, these men were eager to help in the war effort but restricted from combat by their pacifist beliefs. So, instead, they volunteered to become guinea pigs in one of the most unusual experiments in medical history -- one that required a year of systematic starvation.

Dr. Ancel Keys was already famous for inventing the K ration when the War Department asked for his help with feeding the starving citizens of Europe and the Far East at the war's end. Fascists and Communists, it was feared, could gain a foothold in war-ravaged areas. "Starved people," Keys liked to say, "can't be taught Democracy." The government needed to know the best way to rehabilitate those people who had been severely underfed during the long war. To study rehabilitation, Keys first needed to create a pool of starving test subjects.

Gathered in a cutting-edge lab underneath the football stadium at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Keys' test subjects forsook most food and were monitored constantly so that Dr. Keys and his scientists could study the effects of starvation on otherwise healthy people. While the weight loss of the men followed a neat mathematical curve, the psychological deterioration was less predictable. Some men drank quarts and quarts of water to fill their empty stomachs. One man chewed as many as forty packs of gum a day. One man mutilated himself to escape the experiment. Ultimately only four of the men were expelled from the experiment for cheating -- a testament to the volunteers' determination and toughness.

To prevent atrocities of the kind committed by the Nazi doctors, international law now prevents this kind of experimentation on healthy people. But in this remarkable book, Todd Tucker captures a lost sliver of American history -- a time when cold scientific principles collided with living, breathing human beings. Tucker depicts the agony and endurance of a group of extraordinary men whose lives were altered not only for the year they participated in the experiment, but forever.Direct download links available for PRETITLE The Great Starvation Experiment: The Heroic Men Who Starved so That Millions Could Live POSTTITLE

• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• File Size: 426 KB
• Print Length: 288 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0743270304
• Publisher: Free Press (April 25, 2006)
• Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000GCFXO0
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #177,250 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #27 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Research
  • #67 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Special Topics > History
• #27 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Research
• #67 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Special Topics > History

The Great Starvation Experiment: The Heroic Men Who Starved so That Millions Could Live PDF

In the final months of World War II, thirty-six Americans were held in a bunker hidden away from the public. They were systematically starved until they had lost a quarter of their weight. The men suffered a range of symptoms (aside from extreme weight loss) including incapacitating weakness and constant headaches. One man chopped off three of his fingers to escape the agony. The Americans were starved under the supervision of a doctor who was conducting an experiment.

Sounds like a tale of Nazi atrocities, but Todd Tucker's Great Starvation Experiment is about a group of conscientious objectors who volunteered for this experiment in order to learn how best to aid the recovery of starvation victims. The doctor in charge, Ancel Keys, later became famous for discovering the relationship between fatty diets and heart disease.

In addition to covering the experiment itself, Tucker gives us a biography of Dr. Keys, a short history of the conscientious objector in America, and brings up the question of ethics in medicine. After the Nuremberg Trials, the Nuremberg Code was written, an international document detailing standards governing medical experimentation on humans. U.S. doctors refused to accept the code, claiming they were already bound by their own extremely high standards. Tucker presents evidence that not all American doctors felt bound by personal and professional ethics and conducted some rather alarming and harmful experiments on people, usually without their knowledge.

The Great Starvation Experiment is readable and entertaining. It was so readable, with snippets of conversation and anecdotes, that I began to doubt its reliability. But the extensive bibliography, detailed notes, and many interviews convinced me that this is a complete and factual story of a little-known episode of the World War II homefront.

By takingadayoff TOP 500 REVIEWER VINE VOICE

"The Great Starvation Experiment" is a fascinating telling of a little-known piece of American history. While a previous reviewer lambasted the author for giving histories of Dr. Ancel Keys, conscientious objectors, historic peace churches, the Civilian Public Service, and the Experiment volunteers, I found that background information absolutely essential to understand how and why the experiment occurred. Without a basic knowledge of the aforementioned, the Starvation Experiment would seem hardly distinguishable from the sadistic medical experimentations that took place in Nazi concentration camps. As it was, 36 idealistic young men volunteered without pay for an entire year to be systematically starved in order to provide the data that would enable relief workers to rehabilitate famine victims most effectively. Truly, it's a page-turning story of peaceable heroes,

For more information, listen to the author, Todd Tucker's interview on the Diane Rehm show. I believe that you can listen to previously recorded programs online.

By Carole Burrage