The Nuremberg Code: Hippocratic ethics and human rights

Abstract

The tension between Hippocratic medical ethics and human rights is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than by the Nuremberg Code. The Code was formulated in August, 1947, in Nuremberg, Germany, by American judges sitting in judgment of 23 physicians and scientists accused of murder and torture in the conduct of medical experiments in the concentration camps (the Doctors’ Trial’). It has rightly been characterised as the most authoritative set of rules for the protection of human subjects in medical research.’ Three physicians had central roles in the formulation of the Code--Leo Alexander, an American neuropsychiatrist and the chief medical adviser to the prosecution; Werner Leibbrand, a German psychiatrist and medical historian; and Andrew Ivy, a renowned American physiologist and the prosecution’s chief witness. Both Alexander and Ivy relied exclusively on the Hippocratic Oath and ethics to condemn the Nazi medical experiments. I have already concluded that “[tlhe key contribution of Nuremberg was to merge both Hippocratic ethics and the protection of human rights into a single code”.3 Here, I explore why this merger was ignored by Alexander and Ivy themselves, and has been resisted by physician-researchers to this day. I also explain why the Nuremberg Code alone cannot resolve all the issues raised by contemporary research, especially that in developing countries.