To What Extent Did The Doctors Trial In 1946 Revolutionize Medical Research?

In the mid-20th century, before and during the Second World War, the Holocaust had left the world in disbelief, with six million Jewish lives and a further five million non-Jewish lives taken away by the Nazi regime in the cruelest ways. The Nazi atrocities during the Third Reich were complete violations of human rights as human lives were exploited and devalued in the racist and discriminatory policies and operations. One of the most appalling events was the use of Jews and others in various human experimentations intended for “medical” research. These human subjects were forced to be guinea pigs for experiments on topics such as sterilization, deprivation of oxygen, infection of malaria, and hypothermia.
After the defeat of the Axis Powers in 1945, the Doctors’ Trial took place in the city of

Also, the Nuremberg Code was the first international code to regulate research on human subjects. Despite the likely shock to the international medical community, unethical human experiments in violation to the Code had continued to thrive, particularly in Europe and the United States. This is ironic since Europe had been the region that was affected by the Nazi human experiments, and it was the United States that had brought the Nazi doctors to court and formulated the Nuremberg Code. This led to the question: To what extent did the Doctors’ Trial in 1946 revolutionize medical research ethics in Europe and the U.S. in the post-WWII era, 1947-1976? Through examining the extent of social and political impact of the Trial and physicians’ practice of human research during the thirty years after the Second World War, the essay will argue that the Doctors’ Trial and the consequential Code had failed to immediately induce a revolution in medical research ethics but rather became the foundation for subsequent laws and regulations, steadily and gradually influencing the custom of medical research on human