FRAGMENT FROM NATURE is an historical vignette about the historic public health success of eradicating smallpox. Not only does the history contain the practices of experimenting on prisoners and the poor, it was also based entirely on supposition not evidence in animals. Preclinical studies were almost unheard of back then. However, this extremely severe plague is now eradicated in no small thanks to these very controversial approaches.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0300985810378649