![]() ![]() No more than seven men would be in the room at any given time. Inside, the only source of light was a hundred-watt bulb mounted behind an explosion-proof shield. The chamber was a perfect cube, nine feet in all dimensions. Its door was airtight and forged out of thick metal it had been salvaged from a First World War Navy ship, as was a porthole that served as its sole window. The structure’s walls, made of tile and brick, gave it a vaultlike appearance. The chamber-an upgrade of an earlier model-occupied a corner of Building 326, which also housed the Officers’ Club. Using a Freedom of Information Act request, The New Yorker was able to obtain his letter (click on the documents to expand):Īt Edgewood Arsenal, in Maryland, the Army built a gas chamber to advance its clinical research. “In the hands of competent experimenters much can be learned concerning the prevention and treatment of gas burns in men without subjecting them to more than relatively trivial annoyance or disability,” he promised. ![]() He argued that human experiments with poison gas were necessary and could be done safely. “In the study of vesicant gases, investigators are confronted by one major obstacle, namely, that the skin of man is so different anatomically from that of laboratory animals that the latter are relatively useless as subjects for experimentation,” he explained. A year later, Richards wrote to the Secretaries of the Army and the Navy, asking their permission to use soldiers as test subjects. Roosevelt appointed Alfred Richards, a respected pharmacologist, to coördinate the wartime medical research. When the Second World War began, there was a new urgency to research poison gases, and the work focussed intensively on mustard gas and similar chemicals. Those who could move broke and ran, trying generally in vain, to outstrip the cloud which followed inexorably after them.”Īs the war progressed, new weapons were unleashed on the battlefield-among them mustard gas, a vesicant, which causes blistering upon contact with skin. First wonder, then fear then, as the first fringes of the cloud enveloped them and left them choking and agonized in the fight for breath-panic. As Major Samuel James Manson Auld, a British officer, described the scene in 1918, just after the war, “They saw the vast cloud of greenish-yellow gas spring out of the ground and slowly move down wind toward them, the vapour clinging to the earth, seeking out every hole and hollow and filling the trenches and shell holes as it came. Chlorine vapor hissed out across the battle-scarred countryside the toxic fog climbed to five feet, then to thirty feet, while the Allied forces watched, awestruck, unable to comprehend the menace. During a warm autumn day in 1914, on the Western front at Ypres, in Belgium, German forces buried more than five thousand pressurized cannisters of liquid chlorine, and, at sundown, after the explosions and artillery fire had subsided, they opened them. The Army’s clinical research with chemical-warfare agents arose out of a profound military and medical emergency: the birth of modern chemical warfare itself, amid the trench fighting of the First World War. ![]()
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