Good Old Fashioned American Ingenuity—and Evil

Abstract

Both before and after the Second World War a significant number of American physicians have conducted unethical experiments on vulnerable humans resulting in serious injuries and deaths. Both the American public and the government in later years unequivocally condemned these experiments. While these studies never reached the level or magnitude of depravity manifested by the Nazis and Japanese during World War II, they nevertheless deeply marred the image of American medicine. Unethical medical experiments continued in civilian and military research establishments unabated for 35 years after World War II and more sporadically into the early 2000s. This was in spite of the 1945 Nuremberg Code and American legislation that forbid unethical and involuntary medical experimentation. The subjects of the unethical experimentations were mostly minorities, the poor and the disadvantaged as well as veterans and “captive populations” including members of the military, prison inmates and institutionalized patients, both adults and children.