The Truth about the Devlins

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of historical and systemic racism.

In The Truth About the Devlins, Gabby Devlin, TJ’s sister, takes on a case involving medical testing done on incarcerated people at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia. TJ’s involvement in this case is what sparks his determination to get his law degree and begin to “work for justice” (370). Gabby’s case and her plaintiffs are based on the real history and experiences of men incarcerated in Holmesburg Prison during the 1960s and 1970s. The novel hews closely to the facts of the case, in which Dr. Albert Kligman conducted medical, pharmaceutical, and biochemical experiments on incarcerated people at Holmesburg. Kligman and his associates saw the prison as an untapped source of subjects, and Gabby shares a true and famous quote by Kligman, who wrote that upon entering Holmesburg Prison, “All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time” (65). Gabby also refers to Kligman as a “racist with no moral compass” (63), noting that he referred to the incarcerated people as “anthropoid,” which can be defined as either human-like or apelike—either of which illustrates Kligman’s understanding of the people as less than human. Kligman and his associates subjected incarcerated people to everything from mind-altering drugs to radiation on behalf of over 30 entities, including companies like Johnson & Johnson and government entities like the US Army. The test subjects were paid a nominal fee and given little to no information about the experiments and treatments they were undergoing.

In the novel, Gabby compares the Holmesburg Prison experiments to “what happened to Henrietta Lacks at Johns Hopkins and the syphilis studies at Tuskegee” (66), two other famous historical examples of Black people undergoing unknown or unconsented medical, pharmaceutical, and biochemical testing. In Tuskegee, Alabama, the US Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted the Tuskegee Syphilis Study for 40 years between 1932 and 1972. The study included nearly 400 Black men who were diagnosed with syphilis, promising them free medical care. The men were never informed of their syphilis diagnoses, nor were they treated, even though over that period, effective treatments for syphilis were developed. They were never told the nature of the experiment, and their syphilis was left untreated as the PHS observed how the disease progressed in the men. Over 100 men died from syphilis as a direct result of the experiment, and their wives and children were often also infected. The study continued until it was shut down soon after its existence was leaked to the media in 1972. The Tuskegee Study has become infamous as an enormous breach of medical ethics and became the catalyst for major reforms to ethical standards. It has been widely recognized, as well, for the undeniably racist foundation of the study, which specifically targeted Black men as its subjects.

The case of Henrietta Lacks is another famous example of the intersection between race, medical ethics, and experimentation. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks was treated at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for cervical cancer. Unbeknownst to her, a sample of the cancer cells was taken from her tumor by her doctor. Lacks’s cells were remarkable in that, unlike samples the same doctor took from other patients, Lacks’s cells didn’t die but instead replicated. Since that time, Lacks’s cells, known as HeLa cells, have been used in innumerable medical applications from cancer treatments to polio, and even the COVID-19 vaccine. Her contribution to medicine is vast, reaching into a number of different fields. Lacks’s case and her enduring contribution to medicine have gained prominence in mainstream media over the past several decades. Although at the time, Johns Hopkins was not legally obligated to obtain consent for the use of any patient’s cells, the organization has since admitted that they should have worked with Lacks and her family throughout the process. Although the laws surrounding these issues have evolved since that time, the case of Lacks raises still-pertinent questions about bodily autonomy, consent, patient confidentiality, and the way these issues intersect with race in American medicine. The Truth About the Devlins broaches these same topics and issues by drawing on the real-life story of Holmesburg Prison.