By engaging with the histories of experimental trials or treatments involving tuberculous and leprous patients in American colonial Philippines, and relating them with relevant counterparts in the United States of America, this research will critically re-appraise the dynamics of physician-patient medical encounters, particularly in how physicians made their decisions, and how patients responded to and/or participated in the decision-making process. The research will critically read medical sources (e.g. journal articles, case reports, institutional records, etc.) to historically contextualize how tuberculosis and leprosy experts benefited from the exchanges of knowledge and experiences from their colleagues, and gave ample opportunities for their patients to either question, resist, or even completely abandon their participation in experiments and/or treatments. It seeks to reconceive “closed” medical institutions, where human experimentation indeed occurred and thrived, as spaces where both the physician and the patient arbitrated how those experiments were to be done “humanely”.