In the shadow of nuremberg: Unlearned lessons from the medical trial

Abstract

The abnormalities in purportedly medical research in Nazi Germany were sufficiently extraordinary that they have often been judged a moral travesty of an exceptional nature with nothing to teach us about the ethics of commonplace clinical research. This assessment has for 67 years been a fixture of the American reaction to the Nuremberg Medical Trial and its offspring, the Nuremberg Code. The presumption that the findings of an American court sitting in judgment of Nazi physicians have no relevance to medicine and public policy has caused us to learn less from these events than we should have.