Perfect subjects: race, tuberculosis, and the Qu'Appelle BCG Vaccine Trial.

Abstract

This article examines how Native children of the Qu'Appelle reserves in southern Saskatchewan became the subjects of a trial of the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis in 1933. Race and theories of racial evolution were referred to in the construction of the Native people as "primitives" and the reserves as disease menaces to the surrounding communities. Dr. R.G. Ferguson, medical superintendent of the nearby Qu'Appelle Sanatorium conducted the trial in order to prove that BCG could provide resistance to tuberculosis even among the "less evolved races." While BCG afforded some protection against tuberculosis, nearly one-fifth of the children in the trial died from diseases of poverty, gastroenteritis and pneumonia, as a result of the lethal living conditions on the reserves.