Now Playing
Erased at McGill: How Cameron's Patients Became CIA Test Subjects
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Ewen Cameron's CIA-funded depatterning experiments at McGill University wiped patients' minds clean — without their knowledge or consent. This is the story of how a celebrated psychiatrist became one of MKUltra's most devastating instruments.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Imagine waking up in a hospital with no memory of how you got there. You don't know your name.
Cameron ran the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill from the late nineteen forties. He was a genuine giant in his field.
Cameron didn't fund this research himself. Beginning in the mid-nineteen fifties, the CIA channeled money to him through a front organization called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.
The ethical violation at the center of all of this is consent. Cameron's patients were not told they were participating in experiments.
In the nineteen eighties, surviving patients and their families filed a class action lawsuit against the CIA. The legal process was grinding and slow.
It's worth placing Cameron's work in context of the whole program. MK-Ultra ran across hundreds of sub-projects.
When the Church Committee exposed MK-Ultra in nineteen seventy-seven, the Cameron experiments were part of what came to light. The public reaction was significant.
In twenty twenty-six, Representative Anna Paulina Luna convened the House Oversight Committee hearings that brought MK-Ultra back into public focus. Forty boxes of recovered files were part of what triggered the renewed attention.
What Ewen Cameron's story leaves behind is a precise question about institutional trust. Not a rhetorical one.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.