Craziest Medical Studies
#14 Hofling Hospital Experiment
The Hofling Hospital Experiment is very much like the Milgram Experiments. In this case, however, trained nurses were told by doctors to administer dangerous levels of drugs to patients. Even though they knew that the drugs could kill patients, 21 of 22 nurses did it anyway.
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16:
Headbanging
Would you waste your time and money trying to discover whether headbanging has negative effects on a person, or would you just watch someone headbanging and say "yeah, that's not good." Well, if you're a scientist, you would spend your time and money. They did, however, find out that you can't headbang yourself unconscious.
15:
Hofling Hospital Experiment
The Hofling Hospital Experiment is very much like the Milgram Experiments. In this case, however, trained nurses were told by doctors to administer dangerous levels of drugs to patients. Even though they knew that the drugs could kill patients, 21 of 22 nurses did it anyway.
14:
Monkey Torture
Psychologist Harry Harlow tortured macaques by taking away their babies. He would then put the adults in isolation chambers and watch them go insane. Many of them were incurable.
13:
Reattaching Heads
Soviet scientist Dr Sergei S. Bryukhonenko spent time in the 1940s removing heads from dogs and keeping them alive in a machine. Reports got back to the U.S., causing people to make wild accusations. Some think that the whole experiment was a fraud meant to intimidate the U.S.
12:
Television Makes You Sad
So, a bunch of scientists paid a bunch of people to sit around and watch TV all day. Not surprisingly, they found that watching a ton of TV makes people sad. We could have saved them a lot of time and money.
11:
MK-ULTRA
MK-ULTRA was a CIA operation that tested the abilities of LSD. Of course, they wanted to see how the drug would cause people to change in the real world rather than a lab. Not surprisingly, the results weren't very conclusive.
10:
The Crucifixion Experiments
How did Jesus die on the cross? A lot of scientists have wondered what specific phenomena caused his body to die. Was it asphyxiation? Perhaps blood loss? Oddly enough, several scientists around the world have conducted experiments to answer these and other questions. Some of those secular explorers include Marie Louis Adolphe Donnadieu of France in the 1990s and an American medical examiner, Frederick Zugibe, who is still at work.
9:
The Milgram Study
Dr. Milgram at Yale University created a study showing that people are likely to do horrible things when commanded by an authority figure. In the experiment, teachers and students were put in separate rooms. Whenever the student got a wrong answer, the teacher administered an electrical shock. It started out small enough, but then reach 450 volts. Only 14 of the 40 teachers refused to administer the heavy shocks when instructed to by an authority. The shocks weren't real. They students were acts. The teachers, however, underwent mental agony and stress during this experiment.
8:
The Monster Study
In 1939, Professor Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa had a theory about children with speech impediments. To test his ideas, he created a study that gave positive speech therapy to half of the subjects. The other half received negative therapies designed to prevent typical speech development. It's called the Monster Study because of the monstrous impact it had on the children.
7:
The Stanford Prison Experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment is fairly popular. Head psychologist Philip Zimbardo wanted to see how social roles affected behavior. To do this, he set up a game where some men were prisoners and others were guards. Within a matter of weeks, the guards became abusive and the prisoners became helpless. Before the experiment, these were normal people who would have typically avoided violence and being demeaned.
6:
Two-Headed Dog
Today's horror movies have nothing on reality in the early 1900s. During this time, Charles Claude Guthrie decided that he was going to advance medicine by making a two-headed dog. It worked, kind of. Seen as instrumental in transplant medicine, this small tale is often left out of the history books.
4:
Measuring the Soul's Weight
That 21 Grams movie got its name from experiments conducted by Duncan MacDougall in the early 20th century. This genius thought he could measure the average weight of the human soul. He came up with 21 grams. He also did experiments on dogs, cats, and a bunch of other animals.
3:
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley totally ripped off the Frankenstein concept from Johann Dippell, who spent years trying to reanimate flesh around 1873.
2:
The God Helmet
Michael Persinger gave up his career in neuroscience to focus on his invention: the God Helmet. The helmet used electromagnets to help humans communicate with God. While none of the subjects held a real conversation, many said that they felt pretty weird wearing the helmet.
1:
Tuskegee Experiment
Between 1932 and 1972, scientists working for the US Public Health Service in Tuskegee, AL infected thousands of African-American farmers with syphilis so they could test potential cures. The test subjects though they were receiving treatments for blood ailments.
