What parents encourage their sheltered 20-year-old Kansas daughter to leave home, fly to Washington D. C., and become a human guinea pig? Paul and Esther Sherfy, that’s who. Among other frightfully respectable, thoughtful Church of the Brethren parents including strait-laced Aunt Ethel. They were, after all, sending us off to do good in the world. To follow in the footsteps of the Church’s World War II conscientious objectors who’d willingly agreed to participate in medical experiments and other community service projects, as an alternative to bearing arms. Besides, I’d be with college friends whose Church pedigrees had already passed parental scrutiny. By 1967, the peacetime program of “normal volunteers” at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was already twenty years old and had not yet, to my knowledge, come to any bad ends. Like my college classmates, I heard what I wanted in recruiter Delbert Nye’s pitch. We were, of course, less persuaded by Nye’s description of the humanity we’d serve and the experiments we’d endure than the opportunities a summer in the Nation’s Capital would provide. Ft. Lauderdale for Brethren, Mennonite, and Quaker college students. All with a generous four-dollar-a-day-stipend and room and board.
So a week after junior year finals, Glee and Rayna and I flew from Wichita to Washington National—on those wonderful half-price stand-by tickets given to college students then. We were delivered to NIH by cousin Lee (Aunt Ethel’s youngest) in a battered station wagon provided by the Mennonites for all the summer volunteers.
I remember an hour or two of orientation, maybe a typed sheet of general instructions. If we signed release forms, I can’t find them or summon their memory. We were then given our specific assignments: Lee to a sleep study; Rayna to a metabolic one; Glee and I with four more from other colleges headed off to a fever study on the sixth floor of the Clinical Center The six of us were given an explanation that went something like this: “We know,” a doctor said, “generally the kind of diseases in which fever occurs. But we don’t know what triggers it—what the mechanisms are that deploy fever.” Although here those explanations become murky, because we were also referred to a real patient—Gary—who had a fever of undetermined origin. Gary was to be our living, breathing if seriously miserable inspiration.
Once assigned to beds—two to a room—each room with its own bathroom and view out over Bethesda, we settled into a life far better than we’d ever experience at most resorts. We were simultaneously privileged patients in an elite hospital and welcomed guests of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). In June, while doctors apparently finished preparing our fever experiment, and again in August with our study completed, we chose our meals from a well-rounded menu. Gray Ladies appeared with carts full of books, puzzles, craft supplies, stationery, and the day’s Washington Post. Staff announced the availability of free tickets and transportation to Washington Senators’ baseball games, musicals, band concerts, and plays. Government limousines (over-sized, black vehicles that held nine passengers) made several trips each day from the Clinical Center to the HEW headquarters on the Mall in central D. C. and back. We were always welcome to ride. And because, our experiments either hadn’t begun or had ended or weren’t so taxing, all of us reaped the benefits of those perks far more than “real” patients suffering from real illnesses. Gary, for instance, never got out.
The fever study in which Glee and I participated consumed the month of July. For the entire month, we ate exactly the same food every day, a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet: several slices of bacon every morning, toast dripping in butter, a hamburger patty at lunch sitting in its own grease, a green salad floating in Italian dressing, some tough steak at dinner, vegetables in more butter, etc. We were required to eat it all. And if we couldn’t, were given substitutes equally fat-laden. An easy enough prospect during the first and last “control weeks.” For the entire month we were also required to collect every drop of our urine and were given wax- coated conical cups to take with us if we wanted to leave the ward. And, to top off the fun even during the control weeks, nurses came daily to collect blood.
During the middle two weeks of July, every other night—at midnight—we were given a syrupy-thick shot of a substance that gave us a fever for roughly 24 hours. It only took the first shot for us to dread the metal cart rattling our way down the corridor in the middle of night. We got the injections in our butts, so waited on our stomachs while we clutched the metal bed frames above our heads. We could sleep easily the rest of night, but by morning most of us felt like any other human with a fever: lethargic, achy, anything but hungry. We mostly stayed in bed. To get up, we scooched out of the covers on our stomachs to save aching bums. Climbing stairs was virtually impossible. Eating the required meals took will-power.
Still, while the healthy volunteer boys hibernated in darkened rooms moaning, the four females in our study never really complained. We had the newspapers and radios and all that craft material and each other. I chose mustard yellow yarn to begin knitting a sleeveless “shell”—wardrobe staple that shells were in 1967. We kept up with the growing anti-Vietnam and civil rights unrest around the country. And, because we were so so curious and naïve, on one of our “off-shot” days, we took a cab down Wisconsin Avenue to see A Man and A Woman. The sub-titled French movie that featured more come-hither music and sex than ever came to our Midwestern hometowns. Among all the volunteers that I knew, no one felt put-upon or at-risk. The four females on fever laughed at each other’s waddling attempts to walk fast or navigate curbs. We never tired of telling each other stories of our lives and homes. I remember having to set the record straight about whether Indians and buffalo still roamed the West.
Traveling mostly by myself, I put June and August to intense use. I met the HEW limousine most days and took myself to the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art. Each day, I assigned myself a floor or an era—say Italian Renaissance one day and the Dutch masters another—and took my time wandering through. At lunch, I found a hot dog vendor outside and walked those expansive spaces. I trolled museum bookstores to make my very first art purchases: ten-cent postcards of the paintings or objects that caught my fancy. Some days, I’d ask the driver to drop me off at Washington Cathedral or in Georgetown so I could wander to my heart’s content. I never tired of looking at the D. C. neighborhoods on our various routes through the city—rich and impoverished alike. For evenings, I joined others to see shows. Chita Rivera in Sweet Charity for example. And weekends, that rattle-trap Mennonite station wagon driven cheerfully by Lee delivered us to Civil War battlefields and Harpers Ferry and Alexandria.
I do not know what was in the injections we were given. In fact, 1967 marked the cusp of new guidelines about ethical handling of medical experiments –both by those who created them and those subject to them. Although I haven’t exhausted recent research or NIH archival material, I don’t know whether or how any of our studies contributed to scientific progress. I’ve never believed that any ailment I’ve experienced since could be traced to that summer.
But I very much believe, know—in fact–that my joy in traveling to new places, celebrating public architecture, absorbing the miracles of art through time, getting goosebumps generated by seeing historic objects held centuries ago, and learning how important it was to grow beyond Kansas came from those amazing three months. ©
