The rules that constrain clinical action.
10 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Nuremberg Code
Nuremberg Military Tribunal · 1947
Sets out ten conditions for ethical human experimentation, beginning with voluntary consent, written in direct response to the medical experiments…
+5 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Ethics and Clinical Research
Henry K. Beecher · 1966
Documents twenty-two published studies in which patients were harmed or put at risk without meaningful consent, arguing that unethical research was…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Incidence of Adverse Events and Negligence in Hospitalized Patients: Results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study I
Troyen A. Brennan et al. · 1991
Reviewing thousands of hospital records, finds that adverse events affected nearly four percent of admissions and that a quarter of those were caused…
+1 more at this level
12 of 13 works
Nuremberg Military Tribunal
Sets out ten conditions for ethical human experimentation, beginning with voluntary consent, written in direct response to the medical experiments prosecuted at Nuremberg.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Medical Association
Sets out ethical principles for medical research on human subjects, distinguishing therapeutic from non-therapeutic research and requiring free informed consent, extending the Nuremberg Code into ongoing professional self-regulation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Tuskegee Syphilis Study Ad Hoc Advisory Panel
Concludes that a forty-year study of untreated syphilis in Black men was ethically unjustified from its start, that subjects were denied treatment and informed consent throughout, and recommends federal rules to prevent a repeat.
link checked 17 Sept 2026National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research
Grounds human-subjects research in three principles — respect for persons, beneficence, justice — and maps each onto a practical requirement: informed consent, risk-benefit assessment, and fair selection of subjects.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Mark Siegler
Argues that medical confidentiality as classically understood is already a fiction, given how many clinicians, students and administrators routinely see a patient's record, and that medicine should be honest about this rather than pretend otherwise.
Institute of Medicine
Argues that most medical errors come from flawed systems rather than negligent individuals, and that redesigning how care is delivered, not punishing whoever delivered it, is what will make hospitals safer.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Henry K. Beecher
Documents twenty-two published studies in which patients were harmed or put at risk without meaningful consent, arguing that unethical research was ordinary practice in respectable institutions rather than an aberration.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Tom L. Beauchamp & James F. Childress
Argues that clinical and research ethics can be organised around four principles — autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice — none of them absolute, that must be weighed against each other in every hard case.
President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research
Argues that competent patients have the right to refuse any medical treatment including life-sustaining treatment, and sets out a framework — advance directives and surrogate decision-makers — for extending that right to patients who can no longer decide for themselves.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jay Katz
Argues that despite the legal doctrine of informed consent, physicians have historically kept patients in the dark about medical decision-making, and that genuine patient autonomy requires doctors to share uncertainty rather than just obtain a signature.
Paul S. Appelbaum & Thomas Grisso
Sets out four abilities — understanding, appreciation, reasoning and expressing a choice — that together define whether a patient has the capacity to consent to or refuse treatment, still the standard clinical framework.
Troyen A. Brennan et al.
Reviewing thousands of hospital records, finds that adverse events affected nearly four percent of admissions and that a quarter of those were caused by negligence, giving the first population estimate of harm from medical care itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026