History of Medical Ethics

Eulogizing or Expunging: Henry Beecher, Saul Krugman, and Thomas Parran
Hagiographic eulogies of infamous physicians and posthumous expungements of their names are not uncommon. In 2013 the American Sexually Transmitted Disease Association (ASTDA) expunged the name of Surgeon General Thomas Parran (1892-1968) from an award, citing the President’s Human Radiation Committee finding that Parran had funded experiments in Guatemala, “shoot[ing] living syphilis germs into human bodies,” that he knew it would have been “ethically impossible” in the US.
NYU’s Medical School still eulogizes the pediatrician Saul Krugman (1911-1995), parading his awards on its website without mentioning his ethically questionable experiments on children with mental disabilities.
Harvard ‘s bioethics program and the Hastings Center responded quite differently to revelations about Beecher’s ethically questionable declassified Army-CIA-sponsored Cold War LSD experiments. Harvard’s program linked Beecher prize in ethics to an article weighing his contributions against his ethically questionable experiments; in contrast, Hastings Board of Directors expunged Beecher’s name from its ethics prize.
After a brief review of some facts about these three physicians and a summary of the Human Radiation Committee’s criteria for assessing the character of people living in the past, the floor will be open for general discussion.