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4 principles of medical ethics
4 principles of medical ethics
Ethical principles in the medical field
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Making new discoveries and learning new things should not cost people their lives. Josef Mengele performed a myriad of tests on the inmates at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Most of these tests were done on twins, children, and sometimes newborn babies. These experiments often resulted in the death of the test subject. Since these tests killed people, they broke the hippocratic oath. The hippocratic oath is taken by doctors saying that they will not harm anyone. Because of the harm Josef Mengele caused with his experiments, he should not have the title of doctor. The hippocratic oath is an ancient ethical code that dates back to the Greek physician Hippocrates. This oath was taken by doctors that states that doctors must only provide …show more content…
Some of the tests that Mengele performed on the prisoners of Auschwitz included freezing people, unfreezing the body as fast as possible, and injecting twins with chemicals to see if they could survive (Medical Experiments of the Holocaust). These tests often resulted in the death of the subject, which caused Mengele to take more people from the concentration camp to test on. Mengele repeated this cycle over and over again which resulted in countless deaths of inmates. Mengele sent approximately 400,000 jews to their deaths while working at Auschwitz (Broder). Mengele was also the person who made the judgement on who would work at Auschwitz and who would die. Mengele killed many people by claiming they were unable to work and sending them to their deaths. Due to the fact that Mengele killed thousands of innocent inmates he should not be regarded as a …show more content…
A large amount of the prisoners that Mengele tested were twins. Mengele tested around 3,000 twins while at Auschwitz (Spencer). Josef Mengele tested an abundant amount of twins because the tests he performed frequently killed them. A few of the tests on twins included injecting them with chemicals, drawing blood from one twin and giving it to the other, and taking body parts off of the twins. These tests were extremely deadly which caused only about 100 twins to survive Mengele’s tests (Spencer). Usually, Mengele experimented on the twins for a couple weeks, then Mengele would kill the twins and take their body parts to be examined. This is the major reason why only 100 of the original 3,000 twins survived Mengele’s tests. Josef Mengele was a murderer who killed to learn new information and because of this he should not have the title of
There were, however, some doctors that betrayed this belief and peoples trust. These doctors could be found in concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau. These doctors committed unspeakable acts against the Jews and other minorities, believing that they were conducting helpful experiments. Following the Holocaust, however, they were punished for their actions. Between 1939 and 1945, more than seventy medical research projects and medical experiments were conducted at Auschwitz and Dachau.
Many medical experiments went on during the holocaust, mostly in concentration camps. These subjects included Jews, Gypsies, twins, and political prisoners. The experiments included many of these people never survived many were killed for further examination. The Jewish people got the full wrath of the injections, inhumane surgeries, and other experimentations. Twins were also desirable in these experiments to show a controlled group. Gypsies and political prisoners were experimented with, because they were there for the Germans disposal. Thousands of people died in these horrible experiments. These experiments were performed to show how the Jewish race was inferior to the Aryan race.
As the human species develops, medicine follows suit. Researchers look down medicinal avenues which promise a better life-- a longer life. However, red and blue paint cannot engender purple paint without proper mixing. Thus, health sciences cannot expand without thorough experimentation. The Nazis exemplified this concept of “thorough experimentation” with their cruel and inhumane medical experiments. The trials varied in nature and reason. Some of the “experiments had legitimate scientific purposes, though the methods that were used violated the canons of medical ethics. Others were racial in nature, designed to advance Nazi racial theories. [However,] Most were simply bad science.” (jewishvirtuallibrary.org). The medical experiments performed by the Nazis were vast and highly divergent, but they can generally be divided into three categories: racial experimentation, war-injury experimentation, and pharmaceutical testing.
Hitler's doctors performed numerous experiments on the Jewish subjects with military intelligence goals in mind, they slept at night claiming the subjects were condemned to death anyway. Some of these experiments were:
Dr. Mengele was truly a smart man. He studied medicine and psychology throughout his lifetime, most of these experiences were at the Frankfurt University (9). Little did people known that Josef Mengele was actually hired simply to study heredity in twins. The Nazi army enlisted Mengele during his last years studying at the Frankfurt University.(5)With his expertise in the medical field the SS really believed he could find the key to heredity, which they believed would win them the war. With the extensive capabilities Mengele had, he was able to extensively research throughout hundreds of experiments. Mengele experimented and tested ideas to his hearts content, on the countless amounts of Jewish prisoners.
EX1 Moreover, a good example of the irrelevance of the Oath in modern medics is the statement that a doctor may never “use the knife”, without using knifes, practicing modern surgery would be impossible (Markel, 2004). CR2 In the most Oaths administered by US medical schools, the parts about euthanasia are simply omitted, EV2 by 1993 only 14 percent of the vows taken by students prohibited euthanasia (Markel, 2004), IC this demonstrates that even if the Hippocratic Oath is the moral touchstone of physicians, most Oaths taken by students do not even prohibit euthanasia. CR3 Sometimes in order to safeguard the mysterious power and dignity of life, it is better to administer a soft death to avoid further suffering, EV3 this is also literally stated in the Hippocratic Oath: “I will keep my patients from harm and injustice”(Edelstein, 1967). C Considering all of the reasons mentioned above, the Hippocratic Oath has clearly lost its relevance regarding the prohibition of
When first getting to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, the most popular one of them all, Mengele would be given a role in the selection process where people entering the camps were picked based on their physical appearance if they could work or should be gassed and killed. Mengele’s role in this was to look for the perfect test subjects for his experiments. These subjects were then taken somewhere else and the rest, who were not chosen, were actually saved from the torture that these people received. Although they were not tortured by Nazis, they were definitely tortured by Mengele in the form of experiments, which is actually thought of as worse than torture. Menge...
Dr.Mengele was a Nazi doctor and scientist that did many studies on the twins of the camps; he essentially used Auschwitz as his own personal laboratory. Twins in the camp were his prime victims, one was used as the control and the other was used for testing and experimental factors. Many of these twins were murdered during or after the experiments. Mengele would perform extreme surgeries without any anesthetic. Other experiments ranged from lethal injections, chemical testing, castration, pressure chambers and exposure to other extreme traumas (“Angel of Death”). Eva Mozes Kor and her twin Miriam Mozes were survivors of Dr.Mengele’s experiments. Eva explains how she and her sister were discovered by Mengele in the camps.
Hippocratic Oath was earliest code of ethics to govern conduct in medicine. Unlike many modern professional codes, its intent was to describe a moral vision for members of the medical community rather than to protect members of the community from incurring on the law. This oath and AMA medical ethics are similar as the primary goal of both codes of ethics is to give full benefit to the
Dr. Josef Mengele had a Ph.D and a medical doctorate. He was interested in people who had different colored irises and the treatment of noma. It was previously almost unknown in Europe and ran throughout the Gypsy camp. He first started experimenting on gypsy children. Children suffering from this disease were put to death in order for investigations to take place. Organs and even full heads of the children were sent in jars to institutions. In the first phase of his experiments, Mengele conducted pairs of twins and people with physical handicaps to special medical examinations that could be carried out on the living organism. The experiments he performed were usually painful and exhausting. They lasted for hours and were very difficult for starved, terrified children. As soon as he was finished with the subjects, he ordered them to be killed by phenol injection so he could move on to the next phase of his experiments, the comparative investigation of internal organs at autopsy. He continous did these experiments on twins, dwarfs, and people with disabilities until he had the information he needed. After the Holocaust was over, Mengele was in custody of the United States. Unaware that he was a wanted war criminal, they released him. He then fled to South America to made a new life for himself. Thirty years later, he suffered of a stroke swimming at a vacation resort. In 1985, German police found his body, under the fictive name of Wolfgang Gerhard. He is known as the “Angel of Death” for his cruel demeanor (Background & Overview Of Nazi Medical Experiments,
While other doctors would often get themselves drunk in order to forget what they have done, Josef Mengele would walk into work with a smile (“Josef Mengele, The Cruelest Doctor in the Holocaust,” n.d.). Often known as “The Angel of Death” (“Nazi Experiments,” n.d.), Josef Mengele would often work with kids, and before he performed experiments on them, he would try to gain their trust. He would give them toys and play with them. Many kids there ended up calling him “Uncle Mengele” (“Josef Mengele,” n.d.). However, this relationship would not last for long. Soon he would start to perform his experiments. Josef Mengele had a fascination with twins. He thought experimenting with them would help cure several diseases. This led to him performing many controversial experiments. These included stitching twins together, dissecting them, and giving them blood transfusions. In addition to this, he would often inject chemicals into his victim's eyes in an attempt to change their eye color (“Josef Mengele: The Cruelest Doctor in the Holocaust,” n.d.). Because of his actions, Josef Mengele became the most infamous and feared person in
Even though most of these experiments did not end great, they did have some benefits. One of the mostl known Nazi doctors was Jo...
An idea to hide evidence of the mistreatment of Jews, Jews were sent to death camps such as Auschwitz for mass extermination by lethal gas and/or to be medically tested on for ‘scientific’ purposes. It has been shown that those gruesome tests have in fact contributed to some of the greatest medical break throughs in modern times.
By 1938, ten thousand more Jews were sent to camps. Jews were taken to camps if they expressed negative feelings about the government, if they married a non-Jew, if they were sick, mentally or physically, or if they had a police record. When someone escaped from the camp, all the prisoners in that group were shot. Nazis, who claimed that they did not necessarily hate Jews, seemed to enjoy making the Jews suffer. They also felt that slavery was better than killing their prisoners. Surrounding some of the camps in Poland was a forest that the Jews who planned to escape would flee into. Before the escaped prisoners got very far, they were killed. The people who could not run away from the camps thought about revolt. Joseph Mengels, one of the most notorious Nazi doctors, selected his victims for the gas chambers or medical experiments. His women victims for sterilization were usually twenty to thirty years of age. "Other experiments included putting inmates into high pressure chambers to test the effects of altitude on pilots. Some inmates were frozen to determine the best way to revive frozen German
During World War II, Hitler rounded up people who were not part of the Aryan Race and sent them to concentration camps; in those camps, some of those people served as test subjects for medical experimentation. These experiments separate into three categories. The first type were “experiments aimed at facilitating the survival of Axis military personnel,” (Museum). Next, the “experimentation aimed at developing and testing pharmaceuticals and treatment methods for injuries and illnesses which German military and occupation personnel encountered in the field” (Museum). Finally, the “[experimentations] sought to advance the racial and ideological tenets of the Nazi worldview” (Museum). In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, Dr. Mengele conducted at least two of the selections that Elie had to watch and go through, but it is different because in Night, Elie Wiesel was not aware of the experiments and only saw Dr. Mengele during the selections. Dr. Mengele and other SS doctors received the power to test various medical experiments on Jews, Gypsies, war prisoners, the unwanted, and others that Hitler sent to concentration camps. Some were done for science and others were just to satisfy the doctor's interests.