In July of the year 1963; three doctors at
Jewish Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York had injected twenty-two
chronically ill patients with active cancer cells with the intention to observe
the regression process in patients of their condition. The ethical dilemma that
arises in this situation, is the fact that no written consent was ever taken
from the patients, indeed the patients were not informed that they were being
injected with active cancer cells at all; and rather, the researchers did the
injections on the patient’s assumption that it was a routinely medical
procedure.
The purpose
of the study conducted by the petitioners or researchers was to affirm that the
homograft rejection reaction would be as fast as it was in a healthy patient
which was between four to six weeks. They hypothesized that the rate would be
normal or near normal in the patients who had chronic or debilitating diseases at
the contrast of cancer patients who reflected a delayed regression period of
over six weeks to three months.
The procedure
that was conducted on the chronically-ill patients at the Jewish Disease
Hospital was not unlike the Nazi scientist’s experimental studies upon the human
subjects incarcerated in concentration camps. Each of the twenty-two patients
was injected with a hypothermic injection of a suspension of tissue-cultured
cells in to sites on their body; either their inner thigh or arm. Observations were
then done of the sites at weekly intervals till regression was completed; the
growing lumps on the site grew to about 2cm before exhibiting the regression
stage of the cancerous growth.
When there
was no consent taken from the patients, it is a violation of the human right to
their own body; which states that they have a right to choose what to be done
with or to it, unless there is a dire medical emergency. While no direct harm
was received by the patients, besides being invasively injected, the actual fact
that their consent was not taken, is a violation that caused the physician’s licenses
to be put upon probation, after much deliberation.
I
personally was not familiar with this study and case. I do feel that the fact
that the physicians only received probation was not duly acceptable, especially
when it was clear in their writings and statements that they had only a
clinical interest in their patients as subjects while the cancer cells study
was in progress, makes a violation of their Hippocratic Oath extremely likely.
References:-
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