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Volume II · Page 81
A. Between the collective idea and the state order on the one hand and the medical individual on the other, there stands something rather important — the human conscience.
Q. Professor, if all these experiments were actually conducted, and also as you said this morning and as Moll's book shows, Moll alone published approximately six hundred works about thousands of such experiments (on human beings), must one not say that wide circles of medical men judge the question of experiments on human beings under certain conditions differently from you — from an ethical point of view?
A. That I cannot say, because even Moll writes at the end of this work that it is part of a physician's morals to restrain his urge for natural research in favor of the basic medical attitude as laid down in the oath of Hippocrates, namely, to cause no arbitrary harm to his patient.
Q. But in your opinion, Professor, how should a doctor work in the interest of suffering humanity in cases where, as you have just said, there is no possibility of experiments on animals?
A. The concept of humanity is a very dangerous concept. It is most dangerous of all for the physician. For the physician, the individual stands above all humanity and the individual unfortunately has sunk very low in these last few years.
Q. I believe that you have not quite answered my question. I asked: How do you think the doctor should solve certain questions even in the interest of the individual — questions which cannot be tested with animal experiments and test tubes, as is the case with malaria for instance. This is a problem which must be cleared up if he is to help his suffering patients.
A. That is naturally a very difficult question. But in the end the main thing will always be that a risk must have certain limits.
Q. Thank you. Now I come to another point. This morning, Professor, you expressed disapproval about a book which the defendant Mrugowsky wrote on medical ethics. May I ask, have you read this book?
A. Yes.
Q. Do You know Mrugowsky personally?
A. No.
Q. Then you do not know his ethical point of view?
A. I said that it was quite an ironical joke of world history for someone to quote the high medical ethics of Hufeland in the form of excerpts from his writings, as far as I remember, with a few connecting words and to combine these quotations in a modest
