Abstract

Ludwik Fleck’s article, “On medical experiments on human beings” was published in 1948 in the main Polish medical journal; it was destined for general practitioners. Fleck was prisoner in the concentration camp Buchenwald, where he witnessed Nazi murderous “experiments” on the camp’s imamates; he testified about these experiments in the Nuremberg Trial of Nazi doctors. This article, and Tadeusz Kielanowski’s comment on Fleck text, stress, however, that an exclusive focus on the – hopefully rare – criminal activities of doctors may be misleading. It is important to prevent the numerous ethical transgressions of ‘normal’ medical science and routine clinical practice.