The Changes of Human Experimentation

The world of ethics and moral understanding of medicine was turned inside out as human rights were disregarded in an attempt to understand the anatomy of the human body, as well as its various responses to different drugs and environments. Human experimentation and subject research were of little interest to society before the 20th century (“Human Experimentation, Plutonium, and Colonel Stafford Warren”). The onset of the Holocaust heightened the popularity of that medical field. Experimentation using human subjects has drastically changed from the 20th to 21st century regarding the consent and state of the subject, the intent of the experiments, and the laws and policies passed.

In 1900, Walter Reed, a 49 year-old physician, led medical experiments on subjects who voluntarily consented to the tests. One of his experiments consisted of his medical staff at the United States Army Yellow Fever Commission being bitten by mosquitoes carrying yellow fever (“A slap in Major Walter Reed’s Face”). The object was not chaotically based, but specific to finding a cure. Whereas, in the 1940s at the beginning of the Holocaust, hazardous experiments, intended to test human boundaries, were performed without subjects’ consent and in unsafe environments. These vicious experiments were forced upon Jewish prisoners by two Nazi physicians, Josef Mengele and Shiro Ishii (“Human Experimentation, Plutonium, and Colonel Stafford Warren”). The state of the subjects was filthy and brutal, in their appearance and treatment. Many of the experiments left the victims mutilated and psychologically scarred. They consisted of injections of diseases, subjection to various poisons, and exposure to extreme temperatures. Later, in 1946, Germany received a ‘slap on ...

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