Do you want to make some easy money? Find the nearest research center, fill out some paperwork, and let the fun begin: poking, prodding, swallowing pills and caplets, and much, much more. Sometimes you even get a nice bed in a safe environment if the testing requires you to stay overnight.
Participating in medical research studies as a human guinea pig has not always been voluntary. In fact, it wasn’t until 1947 that representatives of several nations got together to issue a document stating that human subjects always need to give their (informed) consent. Up until that time it had been common to use certain people, especially prisoners, as unwilling guinea pigs.
Perhaps the most notorious cases of abuse in medical research were committed by Joseph Mengele, a German SS officer and physician in Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War. He conducted a large number of experiments on prisoners, among others identical twins and Romani (at the time known as gypsies). Not one of them volunteered to be infected with a disease or have a procedure done.
Another famous but now largely unknown researcher lived two thousand years before Mengele. His name was Kratevas (or Krateuas), and for many years he conducted experiments on human beings thanks to the financial assistance of Mithridates VI, ruler of the kingdom of Pontus in the first century BC. The king also gave him carte blanche to run all kinds of tests on the kingdom’s prisoners. In exchange, Mithridates received Kratevas’ help in perfecting a universal antidote against poisoning.
Large parts of Kratevas’ records of the experiments he conducted are still extant and I have included a few of them virtually word for word in The Black Sea Kingdom Series: Mithridates, the New Alexander, Mithridates, the Eastern Hannibal, and Mithridates and Hypsicratea. These ebooks are all available on Amazon.
