Why was this drug pulled off shelves?
The firm continued to pressure Kelsey and the agency to approve the application—until November 1961, when the drug was pulled off the German market because of its association with grave congenital abnormalities. Several thousand newborns in Europe and elsewhere suffered the teratogenic effects of thalidomide. Though the drug was never approved in the USA, the firm distributed Kevadon to over 1,000 physicians there under the guise of investigational use. Over 20,000 Americans received thalidomide in this "study," including 624 pregnant patients, and about 17 known newborns suffered the effects of the drug.[citation needed]
In the early 1970s (1973, to be particular) when the military junta took over power in Uruguay, art suffered in Montevideo. The art studios went into protest mode, with Rimer Cardillo, one of the country's leading artists, making the National Institute of Fine Arts, Montevideo a "hotbed of resistance". This resulted in the military junta coming down heavily on artists by closing the Fine Art Institute and carting away all the presses and other studio equipment. Consequently, the learning of fine arts was only in private studios run by people who had been let out of jail, in works of printing and on paper and also painting and sculpture. It resumed much later.