Intended for healthcare professionals

Nuremberg

The Nuremberg Code (1947)

BMJ 1996; 313 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.313.7070.1448 (Published 07 December 1996) Cite this as: BMJ 1996;313:1448

The judgment by the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg laid down 10 standards to which physicians must conform when carrying out experiments on human subjects.

PERMISSIBLE MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

The great weight of the evidence before us to effect that certain types of medical experiments on human beings, when kept within reasonably well-defined bounds, conform to the ethics of the medical profession generally. The protagonists of the practice of human experimentation justify their views on the basis that such experiments yield results for the good of society that are unprocurable by other methods or means of study. All agree, however, that certain basic principles must be observed in order to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts:

  1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely …

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