Emilie villegas
Today’s medicine has helped many across the globe. Although common diseases such as diabetes, cancer, HIV, and aids have no cure, treatments were found. As for many other diseases, treatments have stopped their rage and can lead people to living healthy lives. However, there is one method that has been deemed unethical and unnecessary. That is human experimentation.
Human experimentation has made medical history since way back when. Most cures to diseases have been made with help of using people. Soldiers, prisoners, the poor, and the mentally ill were subjected to medical testing. Each without their own consent.
In 1796, an English doctor named Edward Jenner, did an experiment which would save countless lives. All with the sacrifice of a young boy named James Phipps. Back then a virus went around, taking the lives of many people. This virus is known as smallpox which killed many throughout history and around the world. Most commonly history relates this back to Europe. While searching for a smallpox vaccine, Doctor Jenner had noticed that dairymaids were safe from this virus due to their exposure to cowpox. An idea had popped in his head to infect a child(James Phipps) with cowpox, then smallpox. Doing so lead to creating a new vaccination, and the death of James Phipps. This was without the consent of the boy and his parents.
Starting in 1918 and ending in 1922, the U.S, our own country, had an experimentation system which would be done on the prisoners at the California’s San Quentin State Prison. Many prisoners fell victim to medical testing procedures, mainly involving receiving transplanted sex organs from executed prisoners. Head of research Dr. Leo L. Stanley, had many men receive sex organs from rams, goats, and boars. This type of medical research had reached a stop later in the 1970s.
Starting in ancient Greece, and becoming systematic in World War 2, live dissection had made its way into medical history. Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician at Auschwitz Concentration camp, which is considered the most infamous wartime medical criminal. He was referred to as “the Angel of Death.” This man was obsessed with twins, especially if they had heterochromia. He would perform deadly experiments on Jews or Gypsies who were twins. Mengele and other concentration camp doctors would inject chemicals in children’s eyes, amputate limbs, and had done a variety of other surgeries without anesthesia. From 1945 to 1946, the Nazi leaders who conducted these experiments were prosecuted. However, this led to the Nuremberg code, that the subject must give consent.
All of these examples are dirty, unforgiving, and inhumane.To another extent, they have helped with today’s medicine. Some of those experiments have found us vaccines and other treatments that we might not have today. Human experimentation is deemed unethical and unnecessary. It is a method that is looked down upon, but with how far it has taken us, how advanced it has made us, can you really look down on it? Is it something we can protest against it, even when it has done so much for us? Would we do it again? If so, is it worth it?
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/strange-the-sordid-history-of-human-experimentation-101213#5
http://www.iaff.org/ET/Smallpox/What_is_the_history_of_smallpox_vaccination.htm
Leave a Reply