The McGill Experiments
Dad used to be terrified of doorbells. In all of the houses you shared with him in Toronto, the doorbells had to be dismantled and removed.
You knew from a very young age that your father had been abducted and tortured. As an adult, you wonder what knowing this did to you – and how it fucked you up to know that this violence is not only possible but permissible.
No one has ever been held accountable for the violence against your father.
You first learn about Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Art Gallery of Ontario. You are visiting with a friend and stumble onto Sarah Anne Johnson’s exhibit. Johnson’s grandmother was one of Cameron’s victims. In her exhibit, Johnson uses photography, pencil drawings, and small sculptures to explore the impact of being held captive and experimented on.
It is her dollhouse that creeps into you and lingers. You peer through the second-floor windows and witness the trauma and devastation that Cameron’s experiments inflicted onto Sarah’s grandmother and, by extension, Sarah.
Days afterwards you are still thinking about the dollhouse. From Wikipedia you learn the following details: Cameron’s experiments began in the 1950s with Canadian victims. He was born on December 24, 1901, and died in 1967 of a heart attack. While he was torturing humans on Canadian soil, Cameron earned a hefty salary of $69,000; at that time, he was the president of the Canadian and World Psychiatric Associations.
There is a photograph of Cameron on Wikipedia. In the photograph, he is wearing rectangle-shaped glasses; his lips are stretched into a smirk. He is looking slightly to the right, as if he does not want to look directly at the camera.
Does this mean he could feel shame? You have good memories of Dad, not just scary things; not everything was terrible.
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Denne historien er fra March/April 2018-utgaven av Briarpatch.
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