Acres of Skin

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Acres of Skin Allen M. Hornblum A Conspiracy of Silence Dr. Kligman turned Holmesburg Prison into a human research factories. Dr. Kligman established a record of accomplishments and financial success from the sweat of prison inmates anxious to earn money to provide for themselves. Although Nazi physicians had been sentenced to death because of the Nuremburg Code, the assistant dean of the Harvard Medical School told an administrative board that it was not pertinent to or adequate for the conduct of medical research in the United States. Dr. Andrew Ivy argued on the witness stand that prison research in America was “ideal” and “all subjects have been volunteers in the absence of coercion in any form” The physicians interviewed for this book report that medical ethics was not taught in medical school and that the Nuremburg Code was never mentioned. The American Medical Associate adopted the Rules of Human Experimentation prescribing that: 1. The voluntary consent of the person on whom the experiment is to be performed must be obtained. 2. The danger of each experiment must be previously investigated by animal experimentation. 3. The experiment must be performed under proper medical protection and management. At the same time, medical journals published articles reporting and recommending the use of vulnerable, institutionalized children or prisoners as “ideal” test subjects. For physician researchers, there seemed to be no restraints. The doctors that entered Holmesburg prison viewed the prisoners as a “fertile field” of investigatory opportunity. Albert Kligman referred to them as “Acres of Skin”. Dr. Kligman’s research programs were established to investigate diseases and train residents in dermatology at the University of Pennyslvania, but in time, it strayed from it’s mission and began disregarding protocol and violating
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