s without their awareness or consent. The researchers even worked to minimize the possibility of these men receiving treatment from other medical sources by giving them a free but ineffective treatment so they would not seek help elsewhere. There was no effective cure for syphilis when the study started, but later it was found that penicillin was effective. This new treatment was withheld from the subjects. The ethical lapses in this research design were numerous: lack of consent; deliberate lying about symptoms and treatment; deliberate withholding of treatment; periodic spinal taps that were painful and that involved medical complications; invasion of privacy for the subjects and their families (which continued after death with deception to obtain autopsy results); and so on. There was even a group of 200 men who were told they had syphilis when they did not in order to provide data on comparable psychological stress for comparisons with the experimental group (Chadwick, Bahr, and Albrecht 16-17).
After World War II, evidence presented at the Nuremberg trials indicated the degree of complicity of many physicians in the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps:
Photographs, original documents and photostats, depositions and live testimony, all told of torture and murder in the name of science by some of the most distinguished members of the German medical and
scientific community (Gallegher 254-255).
The prosecution noted that the use of Aktion T-4 to kill was not mercy killing as claimed but murder and that the killing had been undertaken without the authorization of law, even Nazi law. The prosecution also noted that the doctors running the program had extended the killing far beyond even what had been authorized by Hitler:
In closing, [U.S. Brigadier General Telford Taylor, chief of counsel] spoke of the utter perversion of medical ethics by the doctors of Germany during the Nazi years. . . These men, perfo...