Talk:Willowbrook State School

Untitled
This needs more history on how and why the school was closed. &mdash; Catherine\talk 08:52, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

I am a student at University in America and I plan on adding more information to the closing of Willowbrook and it's affect on the the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980. For the closing of Willowbrook, I want to add more of the people who legally participated in the closing. Governors, lawyers etc.   — Preceding unsigned comment added by PeterHeres35236 (talk • contribs) 01:57, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 10:42, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

References in short supply
Hello, folks. For such an important topic with such long reaching ramifications, the citations are quite slim. Please consider reviewing and adding the following reference sources: [* Book - I cannot understand why this book was not consulted for this article, all mention is missing; it's the major work on what happened at Willowbrook and in the aftermath:] The Willowbrook Wars, David Rothman and Sheila Rothman (1984). [* Documentary:] Unforgotten: Twenty-Five Years After Willowbrook, Danny Fisher producer (1997). [* NIH online teaching modules on bioethics:] Module 5, "Research Ethics: The Power and Peril of Human Experimentation" - 5.4: "Willowbrook Hepatitis Experiments" - 5.5: "Willowbrook—Key Questions" http://science.education.nih.gov/supplements/nih9/bioethics/guide/pdf/Master_5-4.pdf NIH, Curriculum Supplement Series, Bioethics: Exploring Bioethics http://science.education.nih.gov/supplements/nih9/bioethics/guide/masters.htm [* Book reviews - a good review has a lot of excellent supplemental information:]

+ "Beyond the Willowbrook Wars: The Courts and Institutional Reform", Joel B. Grossman American Bar Foundation Research Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Winter, 1987), pp. 249-259.

+ "The Willowbrook Wars", Roger Peele The American Journal of Psychiatry, VOL. 142, No. 9, September 01, 1985, 142:1111-a-1112.

+ "The Lawyers' Plot", Joel Klein New Republic; 2/4/85, Vol. 192 Issue 5, p28. [* Archives:] The College of Staten Island, CUNY CSI Library: Archives & Special Collections "A Guide to Willowbrook State School Resources at the CSI Library" http://163.238.8.180/WillowbrookCSI.htm [404 error; I notified the webmaster] "A Guide to Willbrook State School Resources at Other Institutions" http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/archives/WillowbrookRG.htm [* Internet site - discussion of Willowbrook with a reference list that includes some of the sources listed here and others:] "Willowbrook - Institutions and Legacies", Pamela Wilson, Children with Special Needs Editor Children with Special Needs Site BellaOnline: The Voice of Women http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art34797.asp Thank you for your attention, Wordreader (talk) 04:19, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Feel free to add some External links. I added the book reviews to the Further reading section. Biosthmors (talk) 07:25, 12 September 2012 (UTC)


 * PubMed lists 17 articles for Willowbrook, including Lantos (2010) Does pediatrics need its own bioethics? which examines the school's history as a case study. Google Books lists many more references to the school . —MistyMorn (talk) 12:26, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

More portals should be included
If there are specific portals on "medical ethics", "patient rights", and "human rights", this article should be attached to them. I don't know how to search for portals. Thanks, Wordreader (talk) 04:22, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure how to attach to portals either, I've never used one. Biosthmors (talk) 07:26, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Removing inappropriate quote from NYT article
The following quote was included in the section on the hepatitis experiments:

Accusations were leveled that the researchers had used mentally disabled children as "human guinea pigs," but the chief critic of the project — New York Senator Seymour R. Thaler of Queens — later conceded that the work had been conducted properly.

This quote comes from this obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/education/26mccollum.html. The context in which the author of that obituary is quoting Senator Thaler is unclear, and this quote is unlikely to be true. The Willowbrook State School Hepatitis experiments are a classic example of unethical research because the experimenters intentionally infected mentally disabled children with a potentially lethal virus and justified this because they were likely to get it anyway—which was only partially true.

This quote, in addition to being almost directly plagiarized from the source without quotation marks, misleads the reader as to the public opinion on the research in question, and adds nothing of value to this discussion.

I am thus removing it completely, and I request that no one adds it back, in any form, without further discussion here, and the addition of more context and a more reliable citation.

I have kept other information garnered from that citation and slightly restructured the paragraph.

This paragraph could do with a lot more work, a number of the other citations are sloppy. I don't have the time right now though.

Michael Dacre (talk - contribs - email) 23:51, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Michael:

I'm curious about a couple of things--don't misconstrue the intention of my questions here as indicative of a an objection to the quote's removal or a disagreement with your rationale to do so.

You mention that the quote is "almost directly plagiarized from the source" (the NY Times obit), and I read the source and indeed what you say re: near-plagiarism is true. And I'm left to wonder, like you, what's the context of this "concession" from Thaler? If he did indeed admit that the research was in fact conducted "properly" (ethically?), would that not indicate that the researchers did *not* infect patients with the virus? and is this why you're skeptical that Thaler's supposed concession is true?

Is it possible to find out the author's source of the Thaler "concession"?

Thanks, this is good work. Shelbythomas1 (talk) 02:05, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Misleading order
Elizabeth Lee's employment was terminated in 1972 as a result of her activism with the parents.

I'll get to this correction later if no one else does, but Lee was terminated on January 5th and Rivera's report was on January 6th—putting this at the end of the paragraph is misleading. See page 44 of book The Willowbrook Wars (1984) by the Rothmans. ~ F4U (talk • they/it) 18:49, 15 November 2023 (UTC)