Thalidomide was introduced in 1957, first in West Germany, as a harmless tranquilizer by the pharmaceutical company Chemie – Grünenthal. The sedative was specifically advertised (among other things) to pregnant women. For five years, until 1962, Thalidomide was used almost like aspirin; during that same five-year period, hundreds of children began to be born like the little girl in the photo: with completely deformed limbs. There were also many fetal deaths.
The scientific wisdom of the time attributed these deformities to “nuclear radiation.” Thalidomide was meanwhile circulating in more than 40 countries, where births of children with severe limb deformities kept recurring. In 1961 an Australian gynecologist/obstetrician named William McBride began systematically correlating these births with thalidomide use, and in 1962—although the manufacturing company denied any such link—its production was halted. Stockpiled quantities remained worldwide, however, and (commerce first!) the disastrous consequences of thalidomide were not properly publicized. Thus, for several years in the 1960s, hundreds of women in Latin America (especially Brazil) unknowingly took the famous sedative, unaware of its side effects, resulting in hundreds (some say many thousands) of births of children with malformed limbs.
In 1970, the German courts acquitted the company’s executives, and the case was closed with compensation paid to the victims’ families. At least 2,500 children in West Germany—and an unknown number elsewhere—were dubbed “thalidomide children,” victims of an unprecedented “scientific” (pharmaceutical) crime that was hushed up any which way…