Pros And Cons Of Nazi Medical Experiments

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The Unethicality of the Nazi Medical Experiments
Between the years of 1933 and 1945 various medical experiments were conducted by Nazi scientists in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau. These experiments include the freezing and thawing of prisoners to test the effects of hypothermia, the injecting of live tubercle bacilli into the lungs to test if humans have natural immunities to tuberculosis, and attempts to make seawater drinkable, along with many other experiments. Most of the experiments conducted failed and ended with the deaths of many prisoners. Some however did produce results that could be used for different purposes. Although discoveries were made during the medical experiments conducted by the Nazis, it …show more content…
There were less invasive ways to produce the same results as those produced in the concentration camps. It is questionable as to whether the doctors’ goals were to truly make discoveries or to simply torture the prisoners. Doctor Heissmeyer has been critiqued by Dr. Otto Prokop (mentioned by Baruch C. Cohen in Nazi Medical Experimentation: The Ethics of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments) that Heissmeyer was not concerned about curing the prisoners that were put at his disposal. Nor did he believe that his experiments would produce therapeutic results, and he actually counted on there being detrimental, indeed fatal, outcomes to prisoners. Dr Arnold S. Relman, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (What if you knew that many in the medical and scientific communities consider the Nazi experiments bad science?) said "I don't see how any credence can be given to the work of unethical investigators. Given the source of the information and the way in which it was obtained, how can anyone believe it?" He is referring to the fact that prisoners were forced into the experiments, if they argued they were put to death. That is strictly against the code of ethics (discussed in Historical Cases of Unethical Research by Serena Marsden & Melissa Melander.) The patient must give consent to participate in any medical experiments, thus why we have the Nuremberg Code
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