Chapter 8
Military Medical Research & Experimentation
Throughout history, armed conflict has proved a catalyst for urgent and innovative medical technology. The Romans were among the first to discover the benefits of wound debridement and public hygiene. Ambrose Paré (1510-1590), a father of military medicine, confronted novel wounds that he could only try to treat by trial and error. Dominque Larrey (1766-1842) experimented with surgical techniques to amputate limbs and treat gunshot wounds during the Napoleonic Wars. The US Civil War saw the introduction of anesthesia and fledgling efforts to build dedicated units to evacuate the wounded from the field of battle. Antiseptics saved lives during the Franco-Prussian War, while the British experimented with a vaccine for typhoid fever during the Boer War. WWI introduced bacteriological monitoring of wounds, maxillofacial reconstruction and care for PTSD (shell shock) and, for the first time in modern history, deaths from infection and disease did not vastly outnumber deaths on the battlefield. WWII witnessed the rapid development of penicillin on a scale sufficient to save the lives of wounded Allied soldiers and change the face of modern medicine.
WWII, however, also saw Japanese and German physicians conduct brutal medical experiments. Addressing these abuses, the 1947 Nuremberg Code codified ten ethical principles to regulate human research. Voluntary, informed consent leads the list followed by necessity, social utility, reasonable risk and constant concern for the test subject’s welfare. Nevertheless, American and British scientists experimented on service personnel with nerve gas and mind-altering drugs like LSD despite the laws and regulations that should have blocked these experiments. At the same time, medical professionals aided US and British efforts to develop, and defend against, chemical and biological warfare (Gross 2006)
Despite these dark cases, military medical research and experimentation serve the ends of just war as they maintain the fighting force...
Burning Issues
- Therapeutic Military Medical Research and Experimentation
- Vulnerable Populations and Informed Consent
- Avoidable Impediments to Military Medical Research
- Aggressively Recruiting Civilians for Research