The Doctors' Trial and the Nuremberg Code

Between December 1946 and August 1947, an American military tribunal at Nuremberg tried 23 defendants, 20 of them physicians, for medical experiments performed without consent on concentration camp prisoners and for involvement in killing programs. The defendants argued in part that no universal written rules governed human experimentation and that experiments elsewhere had also been conducted without consent. The judges responded by setting out ten principles for permissible medical experiments, now known as the Nuremberg Code.

Its first and most famous principle states that 'the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential'. Other principles require that experiments aim at results for the good of society, avoid unnecessary suffering and allow subjects to withdraw. The Code drew its authority not from any statute but from what the judges presented as basic moral principles, a clear example of natural-rights reasoning about human dignity. Sixteen defendants were convicted and seven executed. The Code shaped later medical ethics worldwide.