rming experiments, sterilizing and killing patients without the consent either of the patients or their families, "departed from every known standard of medical ethics" (Gallegher 255).
The beginning of the Tuskegee experiment took place prior to the crimes of the Nazis in World War II and prior to Nuremberg, but it is held here that the Tuskegee Experiment would have violated the Nuremberg agreements had those been in existence and that there is no justification for such uninformed medical experimentation.
A variety of medical experiments were conducted on prisoners in the death camps of the Nazis during World War II. Clearly, it is not a big step from the presumption that an entire class of people is inferior and can be exterminated to the idea that these same people can serve as guinea pigs in medical experiments, for in both cases there is an assumption of superiority on the part of the dominant force and a belief that the subjected peoples are less than human. Robert Jay Lifton offers an in-depth study of the doctors who
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