1714: Charles Maitland, Smallpox
Dr. Maitland inoculated six prisoners with smallpox, promising them release from prison. (Read D. Wooton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates, 2006.)
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1915: Joseph Goldberger, MD, pellegra
Joseph Goldberger, MD, under orders of the US Public Health Office induces Pellagra, a debilitating fatal disease affecting the central nervous system, in twelve Mississippi inmates in an attempt to discover treatments for the disease. He determined that the disease was caused by niacin (Vitamin B3) deficiency. But the Public…
1938: American Medical Association rejects black physicians
American Medical Association rejects request from 5,000 black physicians to join the AMA. The rejection was widely reported in German medical jounals. (Lifton, Nazi Medicine: the anti-Hippocratic Legacy) Not until July 2008, did the American Medical Association issue a formal apology for discriminating against black physicians well into the 1960s….
1900–1930: Berlin Code of Ethics
Biomedical research in Germany was considered the most advanced in the world — both in its development and its ethics standards. Berlin Code of Ethics (1900) guaranteed that “all medical interventions for other than diagnostic, healing, and immunization purposes, regardless of other legal or moral authorization are excluded under all…
1916: American Medical Association, no research ethics code
“Leaders of the American Medical Association briefly considered amending the organization’s code of ethics to include the provision that human experimentation calling for the knowledgeable permission of the subject. The AMA leadership decided not to adopt such a stance believing it both unnecessary in light of the good moral character…
1897: Giuseppe Sanarelli, MD
Giuseppe Sanarelli, MD, Italian bacteriologist injects the bacillus causing yellow fever five patients without their consent. Three of the five patients died. Dr. William Osler publicly admonished Sanarelli, stating: “To deliberately inject a poison of known high degree of virulency into a human being, unless you obtain the man’s sanction,…
1896: Arthur Wentworth MD
Arthur Wentworth, MD, a pediatrician trained at Harvard Medical School, performed spinal taps on 29 babies and young children at Children’s Hospital, Boston, to determine if the procedure was harmful. Dr. John Roberts of Philadelphia, noting the non-therapeutic indication, labeled Wentworth’s procedures “human vivisection.” (Grodin and Glantz, Children As Research…