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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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…
International Federation of Eugenics — Harvard & the Holocaust
Harvard and the Holocaust (2013) an article by AE Samaan, author of the book, From a Race of Masters to a Master Race,: 1948 — 1848, argues that “scientific racism” which exploded into systematic apocalyptic genocide under the Nazi regime—culminating in the Holocaust —is the end product of a one hundred year trajectory of…
1900: Walter Reed, MD, Yellow Fever
Yellow fever epidemics struck the United States repeatedly in the 18th and 19th centuries. The disease was not indigenous; epidemics were imported by ship from the Caribbean. Dr. Reed decided against self-experimentation and injected 22 Spanish immigrant workers in Cuba instead with the agent for yellow fever. He paid them…
1932: U.S. Public Health, Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
U.S. Public Health Service begins a 25-year Syphilis experiment at Tuskegee, Alabama, involving 400 black sharecroppers. The purpose of the experiment was to study the natural course of untreated syphilis in Negro men. Notwithstanding the participation of black institutions, doctors and the pivotal nurse Eunice Rivers, the underlying premise of…
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…
1914: Justice Benjamin Cardozo, informed consent ruling
In a lawsuit involving the Society of NY Hospital, Justice Benjamin Cardozo ruled : “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body, and a surgeon who performs an operation without his patient’s consent commits an assault.” But…