Medical Experiments During World War II

Surgery done in World War II strongly influenced post World War II surgical procedures. It is important because many major surgeries done today such as heart surgery and organ transplantation were discovered during World War II. Sources for this study will be found from the Klein Oak Library and Gale online sources also professional journals will be found from ABC Clio and JSTOR. A source that talks about how surgical procedures like organ transplantation were affected by World War II is, “How World War II led to organ transplants, and other life-saving inventions.” Another source that underlines the importance of World War II and how it transforms surgical procedures is, “Rehabilitation and Reconstructive Surgery.”

During any war, medical advancements are commonly made in response to the atrocities that take place during these bloody and gruesome times. World War II is no exception. During World War II, medical advances simply had to be made to keep soldiers alive. With all the victims of bullet wounds and diseases spreading around, treatments had to be invented or advanced. I chose this topic because science and medicine is very fascinating to me and I want to become a doctor when I grow up. During the war, penicillin, sulfanilamide, atabrine, plasma, and morphine were used in abundance and saved a countless number of lives.

The High Altitude experiments were experiments for German pilots to test human endurance at high altitudes both with and without oxygen. Victims were locked in a low-pressure chamber, to which the pressure was increased to 68 thousand feet to simulate a pilot’s decent. Sigmund Rascher was given permission to dissect victims’ brains, while they were still alive, to test if High Altitude Sickness was caused by tiny air bubbles in the blood vessels in a certain part of the victim’s brain. 80 of 200-test subjects died outright, the others were executed. A total of 13 doctors were involved.

Doctors Craig Haney, Curtis Banks and headed by Doctor Phillip Zimbardo. This article provides in detail the initial purpose for this study, its participants, the nature of the study, the events that transpired during the experiment and of its results. With this article we are provided with a clear picture of the events that had transpired during the experiment and provides some insight into why the events may have occurred.

Dr. Josef Mengele was a doctor in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He conducted many medical experiments during the Holocaust. One of his experiments consisted on taking baby twins and sew them together to make Siamese twins, he would see if they could still live while doing these experiments. Another thing he did to twins was that he would inject different types of drugs into them and see what would the drug do to them and also see if they could last through all of the injections. If he messed up one on of the twins he would always have another one to test on.

There were a whole lot of experiments there was Dr. Brandt Hitler's personal physician he would do experiments on the disabled and twins like Dr. Mengele also known as the angel of death. Another doctor would cut them and then rub wood or metal

Young men all throughout the world had marched off to war, unaware at what they had just gotten themselves into, many of them sentencing themselves to their own demise. The war had brought a great extent and large quantity of gory injuries and casualties that no one had ever seen before. The scientists around the world would have to step up and begin to create advanced technology and medications in a short amount of time in order to keep up with all of the casualties occurring during World War I. Due to the fact that World War I had brought about so many injuries, it had given scientists opportunities when it came to certain treatments. In other words, scientists took this as possibility of figuring out which medical treatments and inventions worked the best on patients, of which had led to the higher survival rate within the

Many medical procedures and advancements that are used today were discovered during The Civil War and World War I. Without the discoveries in The Civil War and World War I, today we may not have X-rays, anesthesia administration, ambulances, be able to understand and perform blood transfusions or the importance of sterilization today. Because of the advancements from the Civil War in the areas of surgical techniques, treating a patient,

Throughout history there were many gruesome and extensive wars that took place, like in the American Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War 1 and World War II. The medical procedures from the Revolutionary War to World War II have dramatically changed from what they knew then to what they knew of during World War II. For example, the Revolutionary war lacked so much knowledge about healing the wounded most died from infected wounds, in comparison to number of deaths in World War II little to none died from noncritical treated wounds. Another example, is the different anesthetics that were used throughout all these wars that helped treated different pains. Within these wars mentioned played major roles in the development of different medical techniques, procedures, and treatment.

Josef Mengele grew up Gunzburg, Germany. He had a wealthy family and a bright future. The only thing that people can come up with for a reason why he would do these things is his mother had a temper, she would often go into the family factory and criticize workers. By no means should this force someone to torture thousands of innocent people. ( “Dr. Josef Mengele: The Cruelest Nazi Doctor Of The Holocaust.”).

The medical experiments the Nazis conducted were on the human prisoners that they got ahold of during the war. The subjects of these experiments were primarily those who the Germans deemed as useless, or were fighting against in the war, such

The Nuremberg Doctors Trial of 1946 is the preeminent case recognizing the importance of medical ethics and human rights specifically about human research subjects. The defendants in the trials include Nazi leadership, physicians, and investigators prosecuted for conducting unethical and inhumane medical experiments on civilians and prisoners of war resulting in extreme pain, suffering, permanent injury and often death. The Nuremberg Code, borne of these trials, establishes ethical guidelines for human experimentation to ensure the rights of subjects in medical research. Herein, this writer will first identify and discuss ethical dilemmas presented in the Nuremberg case followed by three

World War Two, a harsh period of time in the 1930s-1940s, filled with controversial arguments, political battles, fights to the death, but most importantly, medical advancements. Did you know that without the research and discoveries made during World War Two, our medical programs would probably be lacking the information we have today? It’s very true, and in my opinion, the war strengthened our medical abilities, and it really put our world to the test. New medicine had been discovered, while old medicine had been improved; horrible medical experiments performed by the Nazis occurred during this time; but most importantly, World War Two has affected our medical programs that we have presently. These

The art of medicine and curing diseases was not always approached in a scientific way. In fact, many advances occurred between 1919 to 1939, after technological advances allowed scientists to apply the scientific method to medical research. At this time, the ethics of using patients as test subjects either for new medicines or as samples for further testing were not considered. An extreme example of this was the Nazi’s using concentration camp inmates – including children – to run painful and invasive experiments. More modern examples are not so easy to identify as unethical, however. While amputating a leg to develop methods to deal with fractures and war wounds is obviously unethical, harvesting cells to develop a vaccine is not so clear cut, as the disadvantage to the patient is hard to identify. Coming from the various Nazi testing and especially the Nuremberg testing and trials, another code of ethics was developed, called the Nuremberg Code.

Human experimentation has a history of scandal that often shapes people’s views of the ethics of research. Often the earliest cited case is English physician Edward Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccine in 1796,where he injected an eight-year-old boy child with pus taken from a cowpox infection and then deliberately exposed her to an infected carrier of smallpox. Although Jenner’s experiment was successful and it confirmed his theory, the method of