Making up ‘Vulnerable’ People: Human Subjects and the Subjective Experience of Medical Experiment

This paper explores how ‘the human subject’was figured historically and expands the interpretive range available to historians for understanding the subjective experiences of people who have served inmedical experiments in thepast.WecompareLSDstudiesonhealthy ‘volunteers’ conducted in two experimental settings in the 1950s: the US National Institutes ofMental Health’s (NIMH) Addiction ResearchCenter (ARC)Lexington,Kentuckyand theNIHClinicalCenter (NIHCC) inBethesda,Maryland. Sources consistoforalhistory interviews, transcriptsandarchivaldocuments includingphotographsand records. Political priorities and historical contingencies relevant for crystalising the expert domain of modern bioethics, especially the 1960s US Civil Rights movement, were central for producing the ‘vulnerability’ attributed to the modern figure of the ‘human subject’. Using Ian Hacking’s historical ontology approach, we suggest how this figure of the ‘vulnerable human subject’ affected historical actors’ self-understandings while foreclosing paths of historical inquiry and interpretation.