One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Medical Experiments Essay

The Holocaust was a terrible event that will never be forgotten. One of the worst events that happened was the experiments done on Jews. The experiments done on Jews during the Holocaust, such as freezing experiments, genetic experiments, and experiments on organs, were inhumane and unjustifiable.

The diabolical experiments executed during the holocaust were some of the most inhumane occurrences in history; nevertheless, these atrocities were conducted without consent of the patient they were performed on. The nefarious experiments of the holocaust often resulted in the demise of the unlucky host of the experiments, and if the patent was lucky enough to survive the longevity of their luck would come to an end, as all who survived these experiments were murdered shortly afterward to keep secret of the hideous crimes.

“I will remember that there is an art to medicine as well as a science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife and the chemist’s drug.” (Louis Lasagna). However, the doctors of the holocaust didn’t care, and used the victims as guinea pigs for the results. The medical experiments performed during the Holocaust had horrific outcomes for those experimented upon.

During World War II, there were many acts of cruelty done towards people seen as unsuitable or worthless to the Nazis. These people included Jew, homosexuals, gypsies, and the handicapped. In this paper, I'm going to describe the medical experiments that were performed on inmates by Nazi doctors during the Holocaust. These experiments include: the twin experiments, the freezing experiments, the seawater experiments, and the bone grafting and nerve experiments.

There was a multifarious amount of disgusting and repulsive experiments that killed many innocent victims who were subjected to these experiments as lab rats. At the camps, there was a multifarious amount of awful experiments that took place. In the hot bath experiments, the patient was put into warmer water and their body temperature slowly inclined, which caused many deaths of victims due to shock (Nazi Medical Experiments: Background, 2008). After being forced to take part in the hypothermia experiments, patients were placed under powerful sun lamps that could easily burn the skin (Nazi Medical Experiments: Background, 2008). One homosexual prisoner was subjected to this many times after being frozen over and over again, and then he died (Nazi Medical Experiments: Background, 2008).

Holocaust Medical Experiments “Among all criminals and murderers, the most dangerous type is the criminal physician” (www.auschwitz.dk/doctors.htm). This statement, made by a prisoner in Auschwitz, was an opinion most likely supported by the majority of other prisoners in concentration camps. During the time period of the Holocaust, cruel medical experiments were performed on the prisoners in order to improve German medicine (Nazi Medical Experiments). The doctors who performed the experiments on the patients were responsible for the majority of the deaths (Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine).

Some of the experiments they used them for included treatments for hypothermia, maximum height that crews from damaged aircraft could parachute to safety, making seawater safe to drink, treatments for contagious diseases, test drug efficacy, sterilization, and Josef Mengele’s experiments on twins (Medical). Although many other SS physicians conducted experiments in the camps, Mengele’s are the most famous. Before he came to the camps, he performed numerous experiments on twins. When he arrived at the camps he was told it was okay to kill them, so he took that opportunity to perform long, painful and dangerous experiments

While Elie Wiesel is surely right in his statement, it is not the job of only holocaust survivors, but of all people, to make sure that the horror of the Holocaust are never forgotten. One part of the Holocaust, however, is often overlooked by the general public; The Nazi Medical experiments conducted on the prisoners of the concentration camps. Acknowledging the atrocity of these experiments,

In World War 2 there existed many holding facilities that were known as concentration camps. These camps were erected to contain people that the Nazis deemed “unfit” to live. These people were valued less than human by the Nazis, and that was enough justification for them to commit terrible atrocities to these people. The atrocities ranged greatly, but some of the most horrific were the medical experiments conducted on these innocent people.

Elie Wiesel said, “for the dead and the living, we must bear witness” (citation). During the Holocaust, the Jews were treated terribly. Even though they were mistreated, and beaten several times a day, they still received food and water in small amounts. One of the main ambitions of Germans was to find ways to improve their performance in war, and to make their lives easier and more efficient altogether. The Nazi doctors found the most inhumane ways to do everything they did. Harsh treatment of the Jewish people existed through excessive forced labor, horrible living conditions, and many different kinds of medical

In the Hippocratic Oath, it states, “I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure” (Tyson). Dr. Josef Mengele, other physicians and encampment staff, in charge of medical experiments at concentration camps, discarded this principle, and others, when they chose to mutilate and preform inhumane experiments on innocent people. The people they victimized, were forced to participated for they did not have the option to oppose. During the Holocaust, experiments were conducted upon mainly Jewish people or prisoners from Russia and Poland (Spitz) . Though there were numerous experiments being preformed, it was broken down into; Racial, war-injury, and pharmaceutical experiments.

Doctors of the Holocaust For the doctors of the Holocaust killing became the prerequisite for healing. The Nazi doctors at the death camps tortured men, women, and children. The doctors made injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, and removed organs and limbs. For a doctor, phenol injections were the most literal example of the entire healing-killing reversal.

The Nuremberg Doctor’s trial of 1946 involves human experimentation performed by the Nazi doctors. These physicians were accused of conducting torturous “experiments” with concentration camp inmates. During these studies, physicians conducted treatments that were not permitted and caused severe injuries to the participants, and in some cases, participants died as a result of this. Prisoners were left to freeze to study more on hypothermia. Later, during December 9th, 1946 to August 20th, 1947 representatives establish a Nuremberg trial to prosecuted these doctors for the atrocities that they committed and 23 out 15 were found guilty. As a result, the Nuremberg code was created to

Approximately six million Jews were killed, the most abundant number of all. It was not as if it were peaceful deaths either. They were sick, painful and unimaginable deaths. The people were taken out of their homes, lost all of their human rights and were sent to concentration camps to die. As some of them got off the train, the children were sent straight to the gas chambers. Others were looked at straight in the eye and were shot. The rest of the people would have entered the concentration camps only to be killed by exhaustion or starvation. The terrors of the concentration camps spread rumours out to the ones trying to escape, and the ones in hiding.

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.