Medical specimens and the erasure of racial violence: the case of Harriet Cole.

This article analyses the complex narrative of Harriet Cole, a 36-year-old African-American woman whose body was delivered to the anatomy department of Hahnemann Medical School in 1888. The anatomist Rufus B Weaver used her preserved remains to create a singular anatomical specimen, an intact extraction of the 'cerebro-spinal nervous system'. Initially anonymised, deracialised and unsexed, the central nervous system specimen endured for decades before her identity as a working-class woman of colour was reunited with her remains.

Living Donors and the Issue of "Informed Consent".

This essay considers the issue of informed consent as it arose in the context of 1960s living kidney donors. In one of the earliest empirical inquiries into informed consent, psychiatrists Carl H. Fellner and John R.

African-Americans with End Stage Renal Disease in the Early Years of Kidney Transplantation.

Introduction: The first successful kidney transplant in humans was performed in 1954. In the following 25 years, the biomedical, ethical, and social implications of kidney transplantation were widely discussed by both healthcare professionals and the public. Issues relating to race, however, were not commonly addressed, representing a "blind spot" regarding racial disparities in access and health outcomes.

"Ethics and Clinical Research" in Biographical Perspective.

Henry K. Beecher (1904-1976) played an important role in the development of bioethics. His 1966 article "Ethics and Clinical Research" in the New England Journal of Medicine intensified concern about the welfare of patients participating in clinical research, and his leadership in the 1968 Harvard Ad Hoc Committee on Brain Death redefined the determination of death.

Transforming educational accountability in medical ethics and humanities education toward professionalism.

Effectively developing professionalism requires a programmatic view on how medical ethics and humanities should be incorporated into an educational continuum that begins in premedical studies, stretches across medical school and residency, and is sustained throughout one's practice. The Project to Rebalance and Integrate Medical Education National Conference on Medical Ethics and Humanities in Medical Education (May 2012) invited representatives from the three major medical education and accreditation organizations to engage with an expert panel of nationally known medical educators in ethics, history, literature, and the visual arts. This article, based on the views of these representatives and their respondents, offers a future-tense account of how professionalism can be incorporated into medical education.

Dark victory: cancer and popular Hollywood film.

This paper explores the cultural representations of cancer in popular Hollywood films released between 1930 and 1970. These cinematic treatments were not representative of the types of cancer that increasingly afflicted Americans, nor were filmmakers and studios concerned with realistic representations of the disease, its treatment, and its outcomes. As in the "epidemic entertainments" of the early twentieth century that portrayed diseases as cultural commodities, popular filmmakers selectively projected some cancers rather than others, favoring those that were less offensive and more photogenic.

Pathways to human experimentation, 1933-1945: Germany, Japan, and the United States.

The history of human experimentation in the twelve years between Hitler's rise to power and the end of the Second World War is notorious in the annals of the twentieth century. The horrific experiments conducted at Dachau, Auschwitz, Ravensbrueck, Birkenau, and other National Socialist concentration camps reflected an extreme indifference to human life and human suffering. Unfortunately, they do not reflect the extent and complexity of the human experiments undertaken in the years between 1933 and 1945.

Children as guinea pigs: historical perspective.

Experimentation involving children is not a new phenomenon. Children have been used as research subjects in a diverse set of experiments, including the trials of new vaccines and sera, in efforts to understand normal pediatric anatomy and physiology and in the development of new drugs and procedures. Concern about child participants in research is also not a new development.

Revising the history of Cold War research ethics.

President Clinton's charge to the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments included the identification of ethical and legal standards for evaluating government-sponsored radiation experiments conducted during the Cold War. In this paper, we review the traditional account of the history of American research ethics, and then highlight and explain the significance of a number of the Committee's historical findings as they relate to this account. These findings include both the national defense establishment's struggles with legal and insurance issues concerning human experiments, and the medical profession's perspective on human experimentation in the years following the Nuremberg Medical Trials.