9/16/13
EngWr 300

The Declaration of Geneva, or better known as the Physician's Oath, was adopted by the General Assembly of the World Medical Association at Geneva in 1948. It is a declaration of a physician's commitment to the humanitarian goals of medicine, a declaration that was especially important in view of the medical crimes which had just been committed in Nazi Germany. The Declaration of Geneva was intended as a revision of the Hippocratic Oath to a formulation of that oath's moral truths that could be comprehended and acknowledged in a modern way, basically giving the physicians a statement to base their ethical duties off of. The Nuremberg Code which came into being as a result of the Nuremberg Trials at the end of the Second World War is a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation. These documents are extremely important to the world and all of our medical practices we adhere to. They set up principles based on morals and ethics we as humans need to follow in order to not repeat the horrific and gruesome practices Nazi Germany and other countries during the Second World War exerted. The judges at Nuremberg, although they realized the importance of Hippocratic ethics, recognized that more was necessary to protect human research subjects. They needed to create these sets of codes and declaration. This code and declaration are both essential to us as a human species to develop a better sense of human rights. For my research topic, Holmesburg Prison inmate experimentation, these two documents play a crucial role in determining if what these doctors or researchers were doing was violating the tenets of these documents. Senator Ted Kennedy remarked how, in spite of the sets of ethical principles laid out in the 1947 Nuremberg Code and the