 | Figure 1 Wolfgang Weyers |
But what if we accept that experimental abuses had plausible rationales? Some experiments might have more valid scientific reasons than others, but what if even the most gruesome research had some basis in medical science? Wolfgang Weyers offers an overview of human experiments from their origins in ancient medicine to modern times, written very much in terms of scientific motives and the relative strengths and weaknesses of what he coyly dubs “dubious experiments.”
 | Figure 2 The Ravensbrück “guinea pigs”—upon whom Nazi doctors carried out experiments—at a function to honour the man who led their rehabilitation |
Weyers recognises that one difficulty of a medical view is that medical critics have also been experimenters. The physiologist Andrew Ivy, who had a hand in drawing up the Nuremberg Code, and W K Beecher at Harvard were themselves involved in conducting or condoning dubious experiments. Indeed, the author opens the book with a confession and apology that he conducted investigations that went beyond what was clinically necessary.
The book is very much a doctor's view of human experiments, and this has certain advantages. Weyers is a dermatologist, with an interest in dermatological abuses in experiments. What was historically a marginal medical specialty sought through experimentation to establish its credentials. As we move from European medicine in the 19th and early 20th century to US medicine after the second world war, we see how dermatologists took advantages of access to human material.
But the insider's approach has disadvantages, for the history of human experimentation is far more than just an internal medical discourse. Where the author strays into general history he loses critical faculties, and the book lacks crucial context.
Above all, what is lacking is a proper sense of the victims of experiments. Bringing the victims into the story is not sentimentality. Without giving the subjects a historical voice and agency, the author can't explore critically the scientific conduct of the experiments. He does not explain that experiments were sabotaged. Protests were articulate and formed the cornerstone of what became informed consent. The victim's voice and the victim as active rather than passive are fundamental, but—and this is what makes the book so flawed—this does not come through in the book.
We see the strengths and weaknesses of Weyers' approach when he deals with the Ravensbrück sulphonamide experiments. He makes some excellent points regarding the dermatologist Herta Oberheuser, who cultivated links to academic pharmacology and dermatology at the Medical Academy of Düsseldorf while in Ravensbrück. He mentions how the orthopaedic surgeon in overall charge and his assistants communicated the experiments to a supine audience of leading German medical researchers. He doesn't give the victims a voice or any identity as individuals (we still have no clear idea of how many people were victims of the Nazis' experiments and who they were). He never mentions that these people protested bravely and eloquently during the war to the camp commandant and that they managed to communicate their ordeal and even to take photographs of their wounds.
Weyers recognises that his is an unfinished history. He admits that “the days of medical paternalism are over” and that it is necessary for the doctor to put aside any sense of superiority. This is well and good, but it is only half the story, because it does not pursue issues of experiments as accountable to their participants and to society.
In the United Kingdom abuses in experiments continued after the second world war, notably with the testing of radiation doses and nerve gases. We need to give greater attention to the victims of the experiments and to regard them as more than complaining nuisances.
This book is a breakthrough in its examination of the medical rationales for the atrocities. But it is so flawed in its conception and execution that it fails as an authoritative overview.