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Following World War II, the American Military Tribunal indicted twenty-three Nazi doctors and administrators for performing agonizing and often fatal experiments on helpless concentration camp inmates. Using primarily court records, this book attempts to answer the following salient questions: What sort of medical experiments did the Nazi doctors perform? Who were their victims, and what was their fate? What, if any, were the medical results? What legal charges were brought against the doctors, and what was their defense? Who were the witnesses? Did the defendants try to reconcile their brutal acts with the Hippocratic Code never to do harm, or were they devoid of any medical ethics? Did they constitute dishonorable exceptions to a principled German medical profession, or were they symptomatic of a more widespread disregard for traditional medical ethics? In trying to answer these questions, Horst H. Freyhofer gives the reader the opportunity to follow the exchanges between prosecutors and defendants as well as the final reasoning of the court.
List of contents
Introduction: Approaches to Representing the Subject - The Road to Nuremberg - The Nuremberg Medical Trial: A Symbol of Broken Trust - The Hippocratic Tradition and Its Modern Challenges - Human Experimentation Before the Outbreak of Global War - Collective Versus Individual Health After World War I: The Primacy of Ideology - German Medicine After the Outbreak of World War II - German Medical Experiments During World War II - Rescue of Fliers and Sailors - Treatment of War Injuries - Reconstructive Surgery - Controlling Epidemics - Biochemical Warfare - Eugenic Experiments - The Jewish Skeleton Collection - Medical Results of the Experiments - The Trial-A Legal Analysis - The Precedent: The Major Trial Before the International Military Tribunal - The Medical Trial - Preparing the Trial - The Defendants - Count One: Crimes Against Peace-Conspiracy - Count Two: War Crimes - Count Three: Crimes Against Humanity - Count Four: Membership in Criminal Organizations - Verdicts and Sentences - The Trial in Review: How Fair, How Just, How Competent? - The Nuremberg Code - The Trial-An Ethical Analysis - Theoretical Background for an Overdue Debate - Medical Ethics: Hippocrates and National Socialism - Use and Abuse of Experimental Data - Epilogue - Illustrations - Notes - Bibliography - Index.
About the author
The Author: Horst H. Freyhofer has studied modern intellectual history and history of science at Universität Göttingen and UCLA, where he received his doctorate. He has been Associate Professor at Florida Institute of Technology and Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, Vermont, and is currently Associate Professor at Plymouth State University, New Hampshire. His writings have been published in various professional journals, and he is the author of The Vitalism of Hans Driesch (Peter Lang, 1982), a study of the rise and fall of a scientific theory in the twentieth century.
