History Of Human Experimentation Research Articles

A Moral Obligation to Proper Experimentation: Research Ethics as Epistemic Filter in the Aftermath of World War II

AbstractScholars working on the history of human experimentation have long puzzled over the neglect of medical research ethics in the first two decades after World War II, a period that saw a vast ...

Off the RAC

Off the RAC

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Human Experimentation

Health care supervisors and managers may participate in ethical discussions and serve on ethics committees in their health care organizations. To aid them in their participation and service, this article expands upon the knowledge of ethics that they obtained in their academic training. The article provides readers with a common language based on frequently cited cases and key documents. The article traces a brief history of human experimentation, describes ethical breaches in the United States, and summarizes key documents guiding current thought on informed and voluntary consent. The article concludes with 3 common misconceptions that health care supervisors and managers will want to avoid in ethical discussions and ethical decision making. Health care supervisors and managers will be prepared to meaningfully contribute to the discussion of ethical issues and to the resolution of ethical problems in their health care organizations.

The Nuremberg Medical Trial: The Holocaust and the Origin of the Nuremberg Medical Code. By Horst H. Freyhofer. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. 2004. Pp. 209. Paperback, $35.95. ISBN 0-8204-6797-9.

In his examination of the Nuremberg Medical Trial conducted by the American Military Tribunal in 1946, Horst H. Freyhofer has not, in fact, written a book about an important war crimes trial; this is rather a book that ponders whether we can “comprehend” the crimes of Nazi doctors engaged in some of the most heinous medical experiments in history. This is a short volume that tries to cover too much: the Hippocratic oath; the history of human experimentation by doctors; the ethical implications of medical crimes from the beginning of “Western Civilization” to the present; and a theoretical analysis of medical ethics from Goldhagen, to Socrates, to Darwin, to Nietzsche, to Hegel. Freyhofer fails to provide a contextual examination of the medical trial or of Nazi trials in general. The book would have benefited greatly from an examination of the important literature on war crimes trials (Gary Bass, Belinda Cooper, Ian Buruma, Lawrence Douglas, Jörg Friedrich, Michael Marrus, and Mark Osiel, to name but a few). These scholars address key questions about the trope of the trial as a forum for the teaching of history lessons, as a political event, and for its success and failure in seeking justice in cases of mass atrocity. Freyhofer does not explore any of these avenues. Instead, the author's main thesis is that the trial “symbolizes a break, not so much with the image physicians have of themselves, but with the image patients have of themselves” (p. 11). Freyhofer argues that the trial made patients conscious—for the first time—that doctors did not always have their best interests at heart. While this is an interesting observation, it does not suffice to keep the reader engaged in the history of the trial.

Pathways to Human Experimentation, 1933-1945: Germany, Japan, and the United States

The history of human experimentation in the twelve years between Hitler's rise to power and the end of the Second World War is notorious in the annals of the twentieth century. The horrific experiments conducted at Dachau, Auschwitz, Ravensbrueck, Birkenau, and other National Socialist concentration camps reflected an extreme indifference to human life and human suffering. Unfortunately, they do not reflect the extent and complexity of the human experiments undertaken in the years between 1933 and 1945. Following the prosecution of twenty-three high-ranking National Socialist physicians and medical administrators for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg Medical Trial (United States v. Karl Brandt et al.), scholars have rightly focused attention on the nightmarish researches conducted by a small group of investigators on concentration camp inmates. Less well known are alternative pathways that brought investigators to undertake human experimentation in other laboratories, settings, and nations.

Useful bodies Humans in the service of medical science in the twentieth century

In September 1998 a group of papers was presented at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. This collective work was presented as a workshop on the history of experimentation on humans. Now, Jordan Goodman, Anthony McElligott, and Lara Marks have edited these eight papers into the new book Useful bodies: humans in the service of medical science in the twentieth century. The opening essay, “Making human bodies useful: historicizing medical experiments in the twentieth century,” makes two key points: first, that there is very little historical information available on the history of human experimentation; and second, that the focus for the papers in the book is the role of the state in nontherapeutic human experimentation. The authors argue that during the period from 1900 to 2000, the state held the position that it could use the bodies of individuals to meet its needs without explicit consent. This chapter is hard work for the lay reader who is not a historian. In fact, many readers would probably find it more interesting to return to the essay after reading the rest of the book. The following essays are grouped according to three questions: What is a human experiment? Who performs the experiments? Whose body is experimented on? Unfortunately, these questions are not specifically addressed within the essays, so, for the casual reader, the organizing principle is rather obscure. Four of the eight chapters deal with infectious agents, focusing on the study of germ warfare methods in Great Britain; the study of jaundice in mentally retarded children or in persons with rheumatoid arthritis in the United States and England, respectively; and the use of malaria to treat neurosyphilis in the United States. The remaining essays discuss experiments involving some form of radiation, ranging from atom bomb testing by Great Britain in Australia to the development of radiation therapy and the use of radioisotopes in the United States. As individual case studies, these chapters make fascinating reading. It would, however, have been helpful to include a brief summary essay that made explicit how the themes presented in the introductory essay were supported by the case reports. Useful bodies could have been titled Beyond Tuskegee, as it describes other less-well-known cases of highly debatable human research done in the last century. Aside from medical historians and fans of biomedical history, I can see this book being of interest to either journal clubs or teachers of science, ethics, and/or research methods. The well-documented essays cite a rich body of sources, though the inclusion of an index would have made the book more user friendly. There is some discussion of the research done in Nazi Germany in the initial essay, but the remainder of the book is devoted to studies in Great Britain, the United States, and, in one case, Australia (although that research was performed by the British Ministry of Defense). It would have been useful to include information on what nontherapeutic research was being done by states in the rest of the world during the same period. One issue that readers of the book will confront is how to evaluate the research that it documents from an ethical point of view. There is no doubt that the studies discussed in Useful bodies would never have been approved in the year 2004. Even though the focus of the book is history, not ethics, the approaches taken by the essayists — all academicians from diverse fields including science policy, science and medical history, internal medicine, and humanities — clearly range between judging the science according to the time in which it was done and judging it by current-day standards. Each reader must decide for him- or herself which standards to use. How will our work be judged by those who follow us?

Editorial - Human Experimentation

Editorial - Human Experimentation

The dark side to Donovanosis: color, climate, race and racism in American South venereology.

Medical experimentation on humans with "classic" sexually transmitted diseases (e.g., syphilis, gonorrhea) is not generally well known, but experimentation with others such as Granuloma inguinale, or Donovanosis, is even less so. Endemic to non-existent here, hyper-epidemic there, between 1880 and 1950 Donovanosis was linguistically and morally "constructed" as a disease of poor, sexually profligate, tropical, darkly-skinned persons. It was also experimentally produced on and in African-American patients in many charity hospitals in the American South. This essay analyzes Donovanosis literature of the period that heavily featured skin color, climate and tropicality, venereal sin, and racial susceptibility. It then recounts the history of human experimentation with it, and explains both its linguistic construction and its biomedical experimental history in terms of "disease narratives" produced not only by but for venereologists.

Research bioethics in the Ugandan context: a program summary.

Researchers, scientists, and physicians in Uganda have become increasingly aware of the need to develop a systematic approach to reviewing bio-medical research conducted in their country. Much of this awareness and their concern stems from Uganda's high seroprevalence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the consequent large influx of research monies and HIV researchers from developed countries, including the United States and Great Britain.We report on the proceedings of a five-day symposium on bioethical principles governing clinical trials, which convened in Jinja, Uganda in September 1994. The thirteen male and female workshop participants included representatives from the Uganda Ministry of Health, Makerere University, the Uganda AIDS Commission, Uganda's National Council of Science and Technology, and the National Chemotherapeutic Laboratory. These representatives included ethicists, physicians, researchers, and pharmacists, all of whom have conducted research themselves. Initial workshop sessions focused on the history of human experimentation and the development of protections for human participants in medical research, both in the United States and internationally.