A Brief History of Thalidomide, Part 1

Thalidomide has been described as the biggest man made medical disaster of all time. This first part covers what thalidomide is, the animal testing that lead its manufacturer to market it as safe, and its release into the market.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
We have gotten a lot of requests over the years
to talk about the drug the litamide, including from Ginger Cheyenne, Emily, Brittany, Randy, Rebecca, Hannah, Tricia,

(00:26):
Jackie and Terrell. And we've had some spikes in those
requestsed a couple of different points, including when this was
a plot line on the TV show called The Midwife.
We got some rite in a row over the last
couple of weeks. Uh. This has been described as the
biggest man made medical disaster of all time. From ninety
seven to nineteen sixty two, the litamide was marketed as

(00:48):
being completely safe and it was used as a treatment
for morning sickness, but it was not safe. At least
ten thousand people who were exposed to the litamide in
the womb were born with a ring as of disabilities
and medical conditions, and about forty percent of them didn't
survive infancy, and the drug also caused a really unknown
number of miscarriages and still births, possibly tens of thousands more.

(01:12):
A lot of the people who've asked us about this
episode have framed it in the context of babies, but
there are thousands of adults living today who were harmed
by this drug many parts of the world. They refer
to themselves as the Litta miters. As of when we're
recording this in twenty nineteen, most of these folks are
in their late fifties and early sixties, although as we
will discuss, there are also people who are a lot

(01:34):
younger than that. So people who weren't personally affected by
this might imagine this story as something that sort of
is confined back in the past, but it's really a
story that's ongoing until today, and it's also a long
enough story that we're covering it in two parts. So
today we're going to talk about what the litamide is,
the animal testing that let its manufacturer to market it

(01:55):
as safe and it's released onto the market. Next time
we will be talking more about its aftermath and how
it affected everything from drug regulations to abortion law. Um
there is some disability rights stuff along the way that
it's pretty appalling in terms of how people were treated,
and that's going to apply really to both episodes. Yeah,

(02:17):
obviously not a lighthearted rump today. Just heads up, as
if you had not gleaned to that already from Tracy's introme. So,
the letta mine is a taradogen, which means it's something
that disrupts development, and taradogens can affect any stage of development,
but the term is frequently used to describe things that
negatively affect the development of an embryo or fetus, including

(02:40):
causing miscarriage. And lots of things can act as taradogens,
including hyperthermia, infectious disease, environmental pollutants, and alcohol. Pharmaceuticals can
also have the potential to act as taradogens. Many countries
have some kind of a system now for categorizing the
level of risk and whether the dry is recommended for

(03:01):
use during pregnancy. So in the US, for example, these
categories range from A, in which the risk to a
fetus seems to be remote to category X, in which
the drugs risks during a pregnancy outweigh any possible benefits. Today,
drugs that fall into category X or otherwise have serious
teratgenic effects are typically only used with a range of

(03:24):
safety precautions in place. Patients who could become pregnant may
need to have a negative pregnancy test before they start treatment,
and they may also be required to use multiple forms
of birth control and be tested for pregnancy while they're
being treated. Since f d A, drug labeling rules in
the United States have required a section called quote Females

(03:45):
and Males of Reproductive Potential and that details these recommendations
along with whether the drug has been shown to cause infertility. Yeah,
the exact rules and laws obviously vary all over the world,
but even with these types of precautions, it's still possible
for a drug that's known to have these kinds of
effects to harm a developing fetus. A doctor might not

(04:06):
communicate the risks clearly enough for a patient might not
fully understand them, or contraceptives could fail for a variety
of reasons. Especially in places that don't have a robust
medical system, patients might share their medications with each other
without fully understanding the risks involved, and especially because these
same places don't often have the resources to really follow

(04:29):
up and monitor patients, it's possible that babies may be
born with disabilities or health effects that aren't ever reported
or connected back to the drug. Even in places that
do have really robust medical systems. The level of monitoring
and compliance involved with this can really be a lot.
Sometimes it is just not sustainable in real world conditions.

(04:50):
But none of these steps were in place when the
lita mine was developed, and no one knew about its
teratogenic effects when it was first put on the market.
So we're going to get into why that was in
a moment, but first we're going to have an overview
of the conditions and disabilities that the litamide causes in
a developing fetus. So the condition that's most associated with

(05:11):
the litamide is folk amelia, and that's when the bones
and a person's limbs are shortened or missing. This usually
affects the long bones and the arms and the legs,
so sometimes it results in the hands or the feet
being connected to the trunk of the body without a
limb in between. Most of the time these effects are symmetrical,
with both legs or both arms or all four limbs affected,

(05:35):
and the arms are affected the most often with the litamide.
The litamide can also cause a similar condition called amelia,
or the total absence of the limb. The litamide can
also affect a person's digits, including having extra or missing
fingers or toes. Sometimes the size and shape of the
bones can also cause the hands or feet to have

(05:56):
a different size or shape than a typical hand or foot.
The eyes and the ears can be affected as well.
They might be missing completely or missing parts of their structures,
and that can cause problems with a vision or hearing,
as well as blindness and deafness. These are the most
outwardly visible effects of the litamide exposure in utero, but
the drug can also cause internal organ damage, including heart, kidney,

(06:20):
nervous system, and g I problems, as well as damage
to the reproductive organs, and sometimes this is not immediately
apparent at birth, even after a medical examination, so these
conditions are then discovered later in life. People who are
exposed to the litamide before birth also have higher rates
of cognitive disabilities and epilepsy. Altogether, these and other effects

(06:43):
of the litamite exposure in the womb are known as
the litamide embryopathy or fetal the litamide syndrome. Most of
the research into the litamides effects was conducted on infants
in the nineteen sixties, and there hasn't been nearly as
much follow up from the medical community as people have
grown own and aged, so it's really possible that there
are other delayed effects that haven't been widely studied or

(07:06):
traced back to the litamide. One exception is whether the
litamides effects can be passed down to a person's children,
and the litamized effects don't appear to be inheritable. These
are a lot of different effects for one drug to cause,
and many people have several of them, and that's largely
tied to exactly when during the pregnancy that the litamite

(07:26):
exposure happened and what was developing within the embryo or
fetus at that time. The litamides effects tend to be
the most severe between twenty and thirty six days after conception.
At this point in pregnancy, things are moving very quickly,
with lots of growing and development happening in multiple body
systems all at once. Just one dose of the lidamide

(07:47):
can disrupt all of this, causing multiple negative health effects
or disabilities in at least fifty of pregnancies, and some
studies suggest at that rate is actually even higher than that,
and this is why the litamite it's use as a
morning sickness treatment affected so many people. So dramatically. Morning
sickness occurs in about sevent pregnancies, and it can happen

(08:09):
at any time of the day and at any point
during the pregnancy, but it's really the most common in
the first trimester. It's usually the worst from four to
seven weeks after conception, and that largely overlaps with the
window when the lidamides effects are also the most severe
and affect the most parts of the body. So we're
going to talk about how Solida Mine made it to

(08:30):
market without anyone discovering any of this after we first
pause for a sponsor break. Internationally, the pharmaceutical industry really
expanded dramatically after the end of World War two. People
needed treatments for illnesses and injuries that had resulted from

(08:53):
the war. Multiple countries had started establishing national health care
systems in the decades that we're leading up to the
war and then afterward, and that led to more demand
for medicines overall. There were also breakthroughs and various types
of medicines, including antibiotics and anti anxiety medications, and those
had also led pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs very

(09:15):
aggressively to try to compete sedatives in particular, became incredibly
popular as a newly developed class of drugs. The sedative
known as Milltown was launched in nineteen fifty five, and
it quickly became the best selling drug in the United States.
Drug manufacturers around the world we're trying to break into
this fast growing segment of the drug market, hoping for

(09:37):
a similar success of their own. West German pharmaceutical company
Shami grunenthalogy mbH was founded in nineteen forty six and
was one of the companies trying to rapidly develop new
drugs and bring them to market. In nineteen fifty four,
they synthesized the drug that would come to be known
as the litamided for the first time and they applied
for a patent. A paper describing the drugs pharmacological effects,

(10:00):
including its sedative effects, was published in nineteen fifty six,
and that paper, it was referred to as K seventeen,
was also when Grunenthal conducted some safety tests on this
new drug, and one of the tests that was conducted
is called the median lethal dose or LD fifty test,
and this test is conducted on lab animals and it's

(10:21):
used to determine how much of a substance it takes
for it to become deadly. The l D fifty is
the amount of the substance that it takes to kill
fifty of the test subjects. The LD fifty tests for
the litamide were conducted on mice and they suggested that
there was no dose, no matter how high, that would
be lethal and fifty percent of the subjects. Everyone thought

(10:42):
this was amazing in terms of the folks developing it.
It's set the litamide apart from other sedatives and sleep aids,
which could be lethal at high doses, like an overdose
could cause someone to die. Based on these results, Grudenthal
started marketing this drug as safe and non toxic. In
November of eighteen fifty six, Grunenthal began marketing a flu

(11:02):
remedy called grip X, which combines solidamined with other substances
like quinine and vitamin C. In ninety seven, it launched
several versions of a drug called coundragone, which was solidimized
for use as a daytime sedative or a nintime sleep aid.
Grip X and coundragone were available without a prescription. The

(11:23):
idea that you could just go to a pharmacy in
nineteen fifty seven and get a sedative over the counter
marketed as a sedative blows my mind just a little bit. Yeah, same,
I don't I don't know what to add to there.
There are plenty of drugs that have sleepiness or drowsiness
as a side effect, but like, if that's in the
US at least, you can't just walk up to a

(11:45):
counter and say I would like a sedative please and
get one. In many parts of the world, in the
nineteen fifties, it was common for doctors to prescribe or
recommend a variety of medicines of pregnant patients for the
sake of their physical comfort and mental health, and this
included sedatives and stimulants and other medications. The prevailing attitudes
about both prescription and over the counter medicines during pregnancy

(12:07):
was pretty cavalier compared to how it is today, and
soon after Contragone hit the market, patients and doctors started
reporting that it wasn't just providing RESTful sleep or a
calmer mood during pregnancy, it was also treating mourning sickness.
Soon doctors were recommending contragone for the off label use
of mourning sickness treatment and prevention. Patients who had taken

(12:30):
it were also recommending it to their pregnant friends and
family members. I mean, people who took this drug described
as being miraculous in terms of the difference that it
made in the morning sickness level. But none of the
tests that had been performed on solidamide before it was
released were conducted on pregnant animals, and even if they

(12:51):
had been, it turns out that mice and rats aren't
susceptible to solidamide in the same way that humans and
many other mammals are. Although there had been and some
clinical trials, no one in them had been pregnant. Also,
the clinical trials themselves were very small and not very thorough.
Testing on some other sedatives at this time had involved

(13:12):
things like examining the urine to analyze how the drug
had been broken down inside the body and how much
of the drug was being excreted without being broken down
at all. Nothing like this was performed for the litamide.
It also doesn't appear that these clinical trials were double
blind or involved any kind of comparison between the drug

(13:32):
anniple cebo. On top of that, the papers that were
published to support the litamide safety and efficacy read more
like doctors testimonials than research that was actually backed up
by data. Vitikin Lens, who was one of the doctors
who made the connection between the litamide and its teratogenic effects,
later said quote the papers published in nineteen fifty six

(13:53):
by Kun's at All on animal experiments and by Young
on clinical experiences with the linamide have so little scientific
value that, in my opinion, they should not have been
accepted for print. In other words, all this testing was
not very thorough or rigorous or well documented. Just one
example of how it all fell short is that it

(14:14):
later turned out that the reason that they could not
find a lethal dose of the litamide and mice wasn't
because the drug was inherently safe. It was because the
mice weren't actually absorbing most of it. Different preparations of
the drug that were tested later on and were more
easily absorbed turned out to be highly toxic. Based on

(14:35):
the litamide success in West Germany, Grunenthal began working on
distributing it to other parts of the world. It was
ultimately marketed and distributed through various other pharmaceutical companies in
forty six different countries under a range of brand names,
including dist of All in the UK and Australia and
soften On in parts of Europe. As all of that

(14:56):
was happening, doctors in places where the litamide was being
used to treat morning sickness, we're starting to encounter babies
who had a collection of health problems and disabilities that
they'd never really seen before. In nineteen fifty nine, a
gynecologist in Munich reported a baby born with folk amelia.
There wasn't a clear connection at that time, but later
on the doctor learned that the baby's mother had taken

(15:18):
gripp X while pregnant. This wasn't actually the earliest documented
case of solidamide having a teratogenic effect, That had happened
back in December of nineteen fifty six, before the drug
was even on the market. This case was a baby
born to a Grunenthal employee and his wife, and he
had been given free samples at work and their child

(15:38):
was born without ears. That connection was not uncovered until
much later. So at first doctors were reporting what they
described as this strange epidemic of folk amelia, but they
weren't really sure what was causing it, as that was happening, though,
doctors were noticing a different pattern and adults who were
taking the lidamide. As ly as April of nineteen fifty nine,

(16:02):
pharmacists were reporting that patients were experiencing things like tingling
hands and feet, or cold hands and feet, or a
sense of giddiness after taking the litamide. In October of
nineteen fifty nine, a doctor named Ralph Voss reported neuritis
or nerve inflammation and people who had taken contragne for
a year. Voss contacted Grunenthal, who told him quote, no

(16:25):
such side effects have come to our notice. Another doctor
named Horse Frankel was also working with patients that were
experiencing nearitis after taking the litamine. He wrote a paper
detailing twenty cases, but for unclear reasons, it wasn't printed
until nineteen sixty one. Meanwhile, Voss delivered a presentation on
the naritis issue on April nineteen sixty In December of

(16:49):
that year, a letter titled is the litamide to blame
was printed in the British Medical Journal. It was written
by A Leslie Florence of Aberdeenshire, and it described four
cases of tingling, cold extremities, leg cramps, and other side effects,
and adult patients taking the lidamide, these improved, but they
didn't really go away when the patients stopped taking the drug.

(17:13):
The letter included the line quote it would appear that
these symptoms could possibly be a toxic effect of the lidamide.
By May of nineteen sixty one, Grudenthal had received reports
of more than one thousand cases of neuritis that were
connected to thelidamide. The company was forced to make the
drug available only by prescription. Before that point, it had

(17:34):
been responsible for more than half of the company's gross revenues,
and it was West Germany's most popular over the counter sedative,
with more than twenty million tablets sold each month. Even
after these reports of neurological side effects and after it
became available only by prescription, Grunenthal continued to market solidamide
as completely safe, even during pregnancy. So we should note

(17:58):
that even today, it is very common for a drug's
side effects, including some very serious side effects, to be
discovered after the drug is approved and out on the market,
even when they're meticulously controlled and carefully planned out. Clinical
trials are very small compared to the general population, and
the real world has a lot of factors that might

(18:18):
not be present in the context of a controlled study.
But it's clear that Grunenthal's original testing on the litamide
was not very thorough, and the company does not appear
to have looked into whether all these reports of near
rytis pointed to a greater problem with the drug. And
in nineteen sixty one doctors started making connections between the
litamide as used for morning sickness and the drugs teratogenic effects.

(18:42):
One was the German doctor vitikin Lens who we mentioned earlier,
and he had noticed the unusual increase in phok melia
and other conditions that we now know as part of
fetal the litamide syndrome. He went back through medical records
and he found that this pattern had started very suddenly.
He didn't initially know what the exact cause was, but
he was confident that there was one, and that it

(19:03):
might be some kind of chemical exposure, like an undisclosed
chemical spill, or perhaps a new household product. Thousands of
miles away. Dr William McBride was working at a hospital
in Australia and on May fourth, nineteen sixty one, a
baby was born there with both folk Amelia and bowel atresia,
which is a condition in which part of the bowel

(19:23):
is blocked are absent. Thousands of babies were born every
year at the hospital, but this was the first time
in its history that a baby had been born with
that combination of conditions. Two more babies with folk amelia
and bowel atricia were born between May fourth and June eight.
McBride realized all three had been exposed to the lidamide,

(19:44):
which had been on the market in Australia since June
of nineteen sixty. On June he convinced the hospital to
withdraw the litamide from use and informed the drug company Distillers,
which was distributing the litamide in Australia. This was the
first published letter specif typically linking the litamide to its
teratogenic effects. McBride later told The New York Times that

(20:05):
he also wrote to the company headquarters in London, but
quote the reply from the medical director of the London
office implied that I was utterly wrong. His high handed
letter implying that I was just a colonial annoyed me.
I was determined to prove I was right. The following month,
Dr Hans Vicker documented twenty babies with folk amelia, five

(20:26):
of which were known to have been exposed to the
lidamide in the womb. But Viker had been told in
error that the litamide was being used very widely in
the US, but that the US was not experiencing the
folk amelia epidemic that other countries were. He learned from
Dr Lens that this was not true, and when he
went back through his records specifically looking for the litamide,

(20:48):
he confirmed its use in even more cases. After his
communication with Viker, Lens called Grunenthal and was told to
expect a visit from somebody in a few days. He
told them that the needed attention immediately, that in a
few days hundreds more people could be taking this drug
for the first time. Lens also sent a registered letter

(21:08):
to the company on November sixteenth, nineteen sixty one, detailing
his concerns. Meanwhile, in Australia, drug company distillers removed the
litamide from the market on November twenty one. It was
only after all this that Grudenthal finally took action, pulling
the litamide off the German market on November nineteen sixty one.
As words spread, it was taken off the market in

(21:30):
the UK on December two. On December sixteenth, Solidamide and
Congenital Abnormalities was published in The Lancet. The lidamide was
taken off the market in more countries in the weeks
that followed. It was banned worldwide in nineteen sixty two,
although in some places it was not formally made illegal
until much later. It was only after all of this

(21:52):
that there was any kind of formal study of the
litamide and pregnant animals. Dr McBride had actually tried to
do this in Australia, but he didn't really have any
experience in how to perform this kind of trial or
access to the lab animals that he would need to
do it. The results of this study were published in
a letter to The Lancet on April nineteen sixty two,
showing that the litamide had similar to ratogenic effects and

(22:15):
rabbits as it was now clear to be having in humans.
We're going to talk about the aftermath of all of this,
and about why the US isn't one of the countries
that we have talked about so far. After we first
paused for another sponsor break between nineteen fifty seven and

(22:37):
nineteen sixty two, The litamide was sold in forty six
different countries around the world, but it was never officially
introduced in the United States. Richardson Meryl, the drug company,
had planned to distribute the litamide in the US under
the trade named Kevi Don Meryl submitted an application to
the Food and Drug Administration. At that time, the US

(22:57):
did have some laws that we're governing the drug approval process.
That application was given to Dr Francis Oldham Kelsey to review.
Kelsey was born on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada,
and she had first started studying unsafe pharmaceuticals while she
was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and
there she earned both her PhD and her medical degree.

(23:19):
At the university, Dr Eugene Galing was trying to figure
out what had caused the deaths of more than one
d people who had taken a drug called Elixir of
Sulfonilla mine, and Kelsey was one of the graduate students
who helped pinpoint the cause as a solvent that had
been used to add a raspberry flavor to make the
drug less bitter. Kelsey was really new to the job
as a drug application reviewer at the f d A.

(23:42):
The kevin On application was only the second one that
she had been given, and in her account, it was
given to her because she was new and it was
supposed to be an easy one. The littamide was already
being used in countries all over the world. It was
regarded as completely safe, so really this process seemed like
a formality. But when Kelsey started reviewing the application, sheep

(24:02):
had some concerns about the litamne safety testing, a lot
of those same problems that we talked about before, and
after some back and forth with Meryl, she rejected the
application on November tenth, nineteen sixty. Meryl reapplied in December.
Kelsey read the letter in the British Medical Journal about
neuropathy and people that had taken the lidomide, which he
talked about before the break. She pushed back on Meryl,

(24:25):
noting that a simple sleep age shouldn't be causing neuropathy
and that a drug that was causing neuropathy could not
be as safe and non toxic as the company was claiming.
This went back and forth for weeks. At one point
Kelsey met with executives from the company and, in her words, quote,
I had the feeling throughout the day that they were
at no time being wholly frank with me. As Kelsey

(24:48):
continued to refuse to approve the kevidan application, more and
more information was coming out about the effects that the
litamide was having on the nervous systems of adults and
on prenatal development. Merrill finally withdrew its application in April
of nineteen sixty two, as countries were banning the litamide.
President John F. Kennedy later awarded Dr Kelsey the President's

(25:10):
Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, and she was awarded
numerous other honors for her work in drug safety. During
her lifetime. She died, and I think so that was
pretty recently. For her part, Kelsey insisted that this was
a team effort and that her colleagues and supervisors should
also get the credit. Even though thelidamide did not receive

(25:32):
FDA approval for distribution in the US, the US did
have cases of fetal palidamide syndrome. Richardson. Merrill had distributed
more than two million doses of the drug two doctors
as samples, and those have been given to patients either
as sedatives or to treat mourning sickness. At least seventeen
people in the United States were born with fetal palidamide syndrome.

(25:55):
Richardson Merrill was also the company that marketed the lidamite
in Canada, where it stayed down the market until March second,
nineteen sixty two. It's possible that there were a lot
more than seventeen people, because only about half of those
folks parents had gotten the litamite in the US. The
rest of them had gotten it while traveling, So it's
totally possible that there are a lot more people that

(26:16):
just aren't recorded in that that official list. Babies continued
to be born with feetle with the litamite syndrome after
the drug was banned around the world, including babies that
were conceived after the bands. People who had bought or
been given the medicine before it was pulled from the
shelves still had it in their medicine cabinets. People who

(26:38):
had not heard about the drug's effects continued to take
it or to share it with other people. Some people
had also just been given a sample of a few
pills in an envelope that was maybe labeled with dosage instructions,
but not with the name of the drugs, so they
might not have even known that it was the litamide
that they were taking. In some countries, governments and medical
associations tried to warn the public lick about the dangers

(27:01):
of the litamide and urged them to go through their
medicine cabinets to make sure they did not have the
litamide or any unlabeled pills. One person who was a
big part of this outreach was Dr Helen Brook Tausig,
along with surgical technician Vivian Thomas and surgeon Alfred Blaylock.
Tausig was one of the people who developed a surgical
treatment for the tetrology of fellow, which caused what was

(27:23):
then known as blue Baby syndrome. That is on the
list for another episode, especially Dr Tausig and Vivian Thomas
um in particular. In January of nineteen sixty two, Tausig
learned about what was happening in Europe, and she flew
overseas to examine babies who had been harmed by the litamide.
When she got back to the US, she undertook an

(27:44):
extensive campaign to try to raise awareness about the drug's effects,
including speaking before the American College of physicians and writing
numerous articles meant for a general audience to try to
warn people about the drug, but this didn't happen everywhere.
In austra Alia, for example, distillers pulled the drug off
the market in nineteen sixty one and warned the Australian

(28:05):
government of the drugs teratogenic effects, but there was not
a wide scale effort to notify pharmacies, hospitals, doctors offices,
or the public about what was happening. As many as
a quarter of the thelidamide survivors born in Australia were
conceived after December nineteen sixty one. In Spain, it took
years for the government to formally outlost solidamide or to

(28:27):
remove it from the official Register of Drugs, and sometimes
warnings used the term the liidamide while the drug was
being sold under other brand names. There were seven different
brands of the litamide sold in Japan alone. Even in
places with more coordinated efforts to warn people about the
dangers of the drug, the first generation of the litamide
survivors included people born as late as nineteen sixty four

(28:51):
and possibly even later. Because all of this traced back
to a drug that they had believed was safe. This
whole crisis led to just an incredible and crushing sense
of shame, grief, depression, and anger for everyone involved, whether
they had prescribed the drug or taken it or given
it to a friend or family member. Many babies born

(29:13):
with solidamide embryopathy died in their first year of life.
Those who survived usually had multiple disabilities that have seriously
affected the rest of their lives, which means that this
whole crisis was exacerbated by attitudes about disability and the
state of disability rights. The various countries where solidamide was
sold all had their own nuances, but in general, disability

(29:36):
was more heavily stigmatized than it is now, and doctors
approached the subject very differently than they do today. So
if you read articles written about this crisis as it
was unfolding, a lot of them don't even sound like
they're describing human beings worthy of life. The default response,
even among medical professionals, was often to see these newborns

(29:57):
as a hopeless and even monstrous track agedy, rather than
as a person who could live and thrive with the
right care and accessibility. There were even cases and suspected
cases of infanticide. In one documented example, a Belgian woman
named Suzanne Vanderputt admitted to killing her daughter with barbiturous
dissolved in milk. She was acquitted in nineteen sixty two,

(30:19):
and many countries, doctors recommended that babies with folk amelia
or other disabilities be placed in institutions rather than being
sent home with their families, regardless of the level of
care that the baby actually needed. My mom worked in
long term care for kids with multiple disabilities for years
and years, and she definitely worked with kids who needed

(30:40):
some kind of twenty four hour medical assistance. This was
not the case with a lot of children who were
born after being exposed to the linamide. Sometimes medical staff
took newborns away from the delivery room before their parents
had held them or even seen them, and a lot
of places, parents who took their baby home did so

(31:01):
against medical advice and after being strongly discouraged from doing
so by their doctors. And whether a child was growing
up in an institution or at home, most communities were
far less accessible than they are today, and today there
is still a long way to go. In most of
the world, schools and other public buildings were not accessible
for wheelchairs. Parents, teachers, and administrators had little to no

(31:25):
education or experience in how to make a home or
a school accessible to children with these types of disabilities.
Prosthetics and adaptive devices had not really been developed for children. So,
in other words, there were barriers everywhere, physical barriers to
being able to access facilities, and societal barriers due to
prevailing attitudes about disability. US includes the litamied survivors who

(31:48):
have described being bullied and harassed by peers and by
adults because of their disabilities. The ones who grew up
in care have often described feeling like strangers every time
they visited their family, least once they got older. But
really this is us as full of information and heartbreaking
as this is simply the beginning of the story. The

(32:09):
Solido mine crisis led to totally revised drug standards around
the world, a criminal investigation, and decades of lawsuits and
ongoing efforts to get access to necessary support and services.
And we're going to talk about all of that next time.
I also have a little bit of listener mail to
close us out, all right, This is from Rachel. Rachel says, Hello, ladies,

(32:33):
I listened to your episode on the women of the
Civil War and loved it, especially learning about Elizabeth Thorne.
So fantastic, but it made me think about how other
women have played a part in military service. I've listened
to your episodes on the Night Witches and the six
Triple eight, Central Postal Directory Battalion and others, but I
really wanted to look into more Canadian history, seeing as

(32:54):
that's where I am from, and I stumbled across the
Nursing Sisters. The Nursing Sisters started out as volunteers during
the South African War, but eventually gained a relative rank
as lieutenants and then officers. By World War One, they
were nicknamed the Bluebirds because of their blue dresses and
white veils, which I just love, and by the end

(33:14):
of World War Two they had been renamed as the
Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps. Another interesting fact, two of
the Nursing Sisters, Meta Hodge and Eleanor Thompson, in World
War One, became the first women to be awarded a
wartime Medal of Valor in Canada. There's a great heritage
minute on this story which I'll link below, and then

(33:34):
moving on to a more personal note. Also, I'm not
sure if you remember Momo the historian hound, but that's
my dog, and I wanted to thank you again for
getting us through so many awful bats. I don't know
if I could do it without you, guys, so I've
added pictures of her into Thanks again, and have a
great day, ladies. I was from Rachel. Thank you so much. Rachel.
Of course we even remember Momo this story and hound

(33:57):
Mo Mo such a good dog. Thank you so much
for this um this email and for sharing this information
about the nursing sisters. I don't know if they will
make it into a full episode at some point, but
in case they do not, there's a little tidbit about
it about them for our listeners. If you would like
to write to us about this or any other podcast,
where at History podcast at how stuff Works dot com.

(34:18):
And then we're all over social media at miss in History,
and that's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
You can come to our website, which is missed in
History dot com, and you'll find show notes for all
the episodes Holly and I have never done together in
a searchable archive of every episode ever. And you can
subscribe to the show on Apple podcast. I heart Radio app,
and wherever else to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed

(34:44):
in History Class is a production of I heart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.