During mid twentieth century as huge advancements were being made in the field of health care, doctors and researchers often faced conflicts of interest between patient care and medical innovation. They were not bound by the same systems of rules, regulations, and checks that are in place today, which allowed these conflicts of interest to manifest themselves at an institutional level in some horrible ways during and after the second world war. When these questionable practices inevitably came to light, the public was shocked and disgusted. It was no longer a certainty that a doctor or researcher would always act in the best interest of their patient or subject. The medical institution could no longer be trusted to act ethically, and this meant that an outside influence was necessary in the previously exclusive field of medicine. In this essay, I will outline three cases that illustrate ethical issues in both the research and practice of medicine that made clear the need for bioethics in the field of health care.
As mentioned above, WWII is when many of these unethical practices started to occur at an institutional level. A utilitarian mindset had taken over the country. If one wasn’t on the other side of the ocean
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The purpose of this research was to study the effects of syphilis on the human body if it went untreated. The main group of test subjects was 600 men of color, 399 of which had the disease, and 201 to be used as a control. The men were never informed of the purpose of the research and were lured into the study under the guise of free blood tests and treatment. Although at the start of the research there was no effective cure for the disease, the men were left untreated even after penicillin was discovered as the miracle cure for bacterial infections. In summary, doctors failed to treat sick patients in order to study a curable disease run its