Review of William R. LaFleur, Gernot Bohme, and Susumu Shimazono, eds., Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research

Abstract

LESSONS FROM THE DARK SIDEAs a society, we grant the medical profession guardianship over the care and treatment of our minds and bodies. We reveal our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, trusting that physicians will handle us with respect, as they are professionally mandated to do. We allow physicians to tinker with therapies and perform clinical research in order to develop better means of detecting and treating our maladies. There are, however, some who forsake their professional obligations, abuse their intimate knowledge of the human body for non-therapeutic purposes, and conduct sadistic and nefarious human experiments. What motivates these behaviors? How have physicians defended such egregious actions in the past?These are some of the questions that Professors LaFleur, Bohme, and Shimazono set out to answer with their collection of essays from renowned bioethicists in Germany, Japan, and the United States. The essays in Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research do not chronicle the human atrocities that took place under the guise of medical experimentation in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Rather, they examine the rationalizations given by the culpable scientists and physicians, and measure the impact of their actions on their communities. These are uncharted waters (the field of bioethics, like others, does not dwell on its failures). The authors suggest that there are lessons to be learned from this type of critical evaluation. The value in airing medical history's dirty laundry, i.e., "the past episodes of repulsive medical research" (LaFleur 2007, 9), we are told, is to make bioethics more attentive to the potential for sinister motives behind human experimentation.Germany's participation in inhumane experimentation is well known and the book looks at that historical era from the standpoint of trends in medical and clinical ethical thought that predated the Nazi medical crimes. The essays