Florence Nightingale was one of the most influential women in 19th century England; a brilliant medical analyst and organizer, a reformer who championed the use of statistics for evaluating the practice of medicine. After the Crimean War (1853–1856) where she witnessed how thousands of British soldiers died from infections, Nightingale…
Nancy Olivieri, MD is widely recognized as one of the preeminent crusaders for research integrity, best interest of patient, academic freedom and as a critic of the ever-expanding corporate influence at universities. She has demonstrated great courage — at great sacrifice — when she acted in accordance with the physician’s…
Maurice Henry Pappworth, MD, (1910–1994) was, by any standard, a controversial figure. “A life-long outsider he chose an unconventional career path as a private medical tutor rather than accept anything less than his first job choice — a consultant post in a London teaching hospital.” By all accounts he was…
John Pesando MD, PhD, an oncologist, did what few doctors have the courage to do; which is to blow the whistle on wrongdoing at his own medical center. Dr. Pesando risked his career by sounding the alarm over Protocol 126, a dangerous, unethical human experiment at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer…
Jacob Puliyel, MD, MRCP, M Phil, heads pediatrics at St. Stephens Hospital Delhi, India, and member of the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI) of the Government of India. Dr. Puliyel leads a group of concerned pediatricians, health care activists, teachers in Public Health and public officials who challenge…
Barbara Seaman, an author, and patients’ rights advocate who was one of the first people to bring women’s reproductive health to wide public attention. She was an energizing influence on hundreds of younger writers and organizers for nearly half a century. Barbara Seaman persistently challenged the medical establishment and pharmaceutical…
Richard Smith, MD. Former Editor British Medical Journal (BMJ), a founder member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, a trustee of the UK Research Integrity Office. Dr. Smith is a fervent critic of current research and publication practices. In a provocative recent article in Times Higher Education (2015) he states,…
Thomas Szasz, MD, “Psychiatrist Who Led Movement Against His Field” — He trained at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis; served in the military at the US naval hospital, Bethesda; but “felt viscerally upset” by “the dehumanized language of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.” His 1961 book The Myth of Mental Illness questioned…
John W. Thompson, MD “must be counted among the saints of his century and of medicine, a person who could confront horrors that others ignored and devote his life to rectifying them.” (Paul Weindling. John W. Thompson: Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust, 2010) Dr. Thompson was a deeply…
“No name in contemporary English medicine is greeted with such polarized reactions as that of Dr. Andrew Wakefield” *read: L’affaire Wakefield: Shades of Dreyfus & BMJ’s Descent into Tabloid Science Andrew Wakefield, MD, an academic gastroenterologist, trained at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School, the fourth generation of his family to do…
1967-1968: Grünenthal executives were put on trial in Aachen, Germany The indictment charged the company with intent to commit bodily harm and involuntary manslaughter. The central defendant was Dr. Heinrich Mückter, an indicted Nazi war criminal, who was the company’s chief scientist and head of research. Mückter was credited with…
“How Men Who Blighted Lives of thousands Evaded Justice.” The post-WWII horror story of thalidomide begins in the picture-book town of Stolberg, near Aachen, in western Germany, with the establishment of Chemie Grünenthal, a Wirtz family-owned pharmaceutical company. After WWII, Nazi scientists stared down their pasts and searched for career opportunities;…
