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Ethics and Experimentation on Human Subjects in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France: The Story of the 1859 Syphilis Experiments
- Bulletin of the History of Medicine
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 77, Number 2, Summer 2003
- pp. 332-366
- 10.1353/bhm.2003.0059
- Article
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This article examines a series of experiments involving the deliberate infection of human subjects with syphilis that were performed in Paris in 1859 by Dr. Camille Gibert and Dr. Joseph Alexandre Auzias-Turenne. Using the scientific literature on syphilis, the contemporary reaction in the French medical press to Gibert's and Auzias-Turenne's experiments, and the private papers of Auzias-Turenne, this paper places these experiments within a context of scientific and professional rivalry, and seeks to show how both moral and scientific concerns shaped and limited experimental practices in mid-nineteenth-century France.