Der moralische Diskurs uber das medizinische Menschenexperiment im 19. Jahrhundert

Barbara Elkeles provides a long-term perspective on the history of informed consent by examining the place of human experiments in the scientization of medicine. Nineteenth-century Germany is depicted as being at the crossroads between French experimental medicine and the clinical approach of the Vienna School. Gradually, science is seen as exerting a stronger claim than individual rights, as evidenced by debates on splenectomy and blood transfusion. Debates between contagionists and anticontagionists shaped approaches to “syphilis” (a term covering several different sexually transmitted diseases). Heroic experiments generated strong criticism. The more “scientific” medicine became, the greater the abuses.

The high point of the book is the analysis of abuses by bacteriologists. Elkeles disentangles the often inflated accusations by critics, from the actuality of the experiments. The bacteriologist Neisser was accused of injecting poison, thereby distorting his injecting of cell-free serum. Fierce debates took place among the large numbers of eminent medical critics as well as among an increasingly vocal public. Elkeles devotes a chapter to the thorny issue of anti-Semitism: conservatives and anti-Semites attacked medical experiments as symptomatic of the malaise of modern materialism, thereby rendering the introduction of new vaccines and drugs a publicly hazardous exercise.

One can well understand the beleaguered mentality of many medical experimentalists, as they found themselves in the position of “enemies of the people” rather than benefactors of mankind. Drawn from a wide range of archival sources, this study merits serious attention from all concerned with the origins and nature of ethical abuses in human experiments.