Long before the US government began conducting secret radiation and germ-warfare experiments, and before the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, medical professionals had introduced - and hotly debated the ethics of - the use of humans subjects in medical experiments. In this text the author provides a history of biomedical research with human subjects in the earlier period, from 1890 to 1940. Susan Lederer offers accounts of experiments - benign and otherwise - conducted on both healthy and unhealthy men, women, and children, including the yellow fever experiments (which ultimately became the subject of a Broadway play and a Hollywood film), Udo Wile's "dental drill" experiments on insane patients, and Hideyo Noguchi's syphilis experiments, which involved injecting a number of healthy children and adults with the syphilis germ, luetin.