The Thalidomide Disaster
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 December 2020
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
December 18, 1970. Decades after the end of WWII a Nazi doctor is on trial. Today is judgment day in a long, difficult legal battle, but this case isn’t about war crimes. The German pharmaceutical company Grunenthal is charged with the worst medical disaster in history: the Thalidomide scandal. The shoddily tested and hastily approved drug made its way into medicine cabinets around the world, and a decade after its release, the reality is becoming clear: Thalidomide is killing babies. Who are the heroes that brought down Thalidomide? And how did this disaster change pharmaceutical regulations forever?
Special thanks to our guest Michael Magazanik, author of Silent Shock.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | History this week, December 18th, 1970. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:11.0 | The courtroom isn't your typical courtroom. |
| 0:14.0 | It's a converted casino on the premises of a mining company in the whole town of Allstorf, Germany. |
| 0:21.0 | It has a look of a big hotel conference room, fluorescent lights, patterned wallpaper, |
| 0:27.0 | crucially, space enough for hundreds of people. |
| 0:32.0 | This trial should have happened in the district capital, Ahn, but they couldn't find a courtroom big enough. |
| 0:37.0 | It's a big case. |
| 0:39.0 | The biggest case in Germany at the time, maybe the biggest case in the world. |
| 0:44.0 | It's about a horrifying medical disaster. |
| 0:48.0 | The Thalidomide scandal. |
| 0:53.0 | The Thalidomide, or Contrigen, as it was called in Germany, was a supposedly safe sleeping pill |
| 0:59.0 | that ended up not being safe at all. |
| 1:02.0 | Babies whose mothers had taken the drug were born with deformed limbs, or sometimes with no arms or no legs. |
| 1:09.0 | Many of them died. |
| 1:11.0 | The drug harmed thousands of infants, and it also caused nerve damage in some adult patients. |
| 1:17.0 | This trial is a criminal case to try and bring the drug company behind the Thalidomide to account. |
| 1:23.0 | The defendants are five executives of that company, which is called Chemie Grunenthal. |
| 1:29.0 | The proceedings began over two years ago. |
| 1:32.0 | Today, the accused men watch from the front of the room as the judge announces that the trial is over. |
| 1:39.0 | And there's no verdict. |
| 1:42.0 | It all ends in a settlement. |
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