Trials of war criminals before the Nuernberg military tribunals under control council law no. 10, volume IIVarious
Philosophy
Trials of war criminals before the Nuernberg military tribunals under control council law no. 10, volume II
Various
Nuremberg Trial of Major German War Criminals, Nuremberg, Germany, 1945-1946; War crime trials -- Germany -- Nuremberg
“The vaccination against malaria was certainly a risk, the
outcome of which could not be foreseen. It was dangerous for the
patient himself and this to a much higher degree than the
treatment with tuberculin and other vaccines, and it also was a
danger for the surroundings and even for the community.”
And, on page 136, it states “Three patients died after having been
vaccinated with blood infected with malaria tropica and not with malaria
tertiana”; and “The tragic outcome of this experiment was discouraging,
and only a year later could the author decide to proceed with the
malaria vaccinations * * *.”
Nobody talks of these victims today, but Wagner-Jauregg’s revolutionary
discovery is known and adopted throughout the world and has become the
common property of all peoples for the benefit of suffering mankind.
These doctors who knew that the fight against disease and death was a
thorny path were all more than ready to sacrifice their own lives.
The real scientist and the real doctor, therefore, do not oppose each
other. However, the scientist must not forget that nature is the
expression of the divine will and that only this cognition can save him
from the “hybris”, the boundlessness which for the Greek tragedians was
the greatest vice of mankind.
Above all, the words of the greatest German physician, Theophrastus
Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, must be applied to both
scientist and doctor “The doctor grows with his heart, he comes from God
and is enlightened by Nature—the best of all drugs is Love.”
My learned colleagues have compiled a long list of documents on human
experiments especially from the Western democracies. It would be unjust,
however, to conceal the enormous benefit of the human experiment. The
fact that Paul Ehrlich dared to release his drug “Salvarsan” before it
had been sufficiently tested saved thousands from the dangerous
consequences of one of the worst epidemics. The fact that Strong took
the responsibility upon himself to perform the probably very dangerous
experiment with plague bacilli made it possible to vaccinate thousands
of persons and to save them from almost certain death. The fact that
Strong was in a position to prove that beri-beri was a disease caused by
a deficiency, and that Goldberger proved the same for pellagra, made it
possible to fight this deficiency and to liberate entire countries from
one of their worst diseases.
With regard to the criminal law, however, and the judgment of crimes
against humanity, it is the decisive result that in other countries,
too, under their own generally prevailing medical and ethical
convictions, doctors carried out similar or the same experiments for the
benefit of scientific research or in consideration of a crisis in their
country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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