Q. I have asked you—does it not appear from this letter, this letter signed by Sievers, that he was willing to allow a Frenchman to suffer for the crimes committed during the course of the collection of these skeletons?
A. Yes. The letter quite deliberately, I believe, creates this impression. That was the purpose of it, like all such letters.
EXTRACT FROM THE TESTIMONY OF PROSECUTION EXPERT WITNESS
DR. ANDREW C. IVY[[8]]
CROSS-EXAMINATION
Dr. Servatius: Witness, take the following case. You are in a city in which the plague is raging. You, as a doctor, have a drug that you could use to combat the plague. However, you must test it on somebody. The commander, or let us say the mayor of the city, comes to you and says, “Here is a criminal condemned to death. Save us by carrying out the experiment on this man.” Would you refuse to do so, or would you do it?
Witness Dr. Ivy: I would refuse to do so, because I do not believe that duress of that sort warrants the breaking of ethical and moral principles. That is why the Hague Convention and Geneva Convention were formulated, to make war, a barbaric enterprise, a little more humane.
Q. Do you believe that the population of a city would have any understanding for your action?
A. They have understanding for the importance of the maintenance of the principles of medical ethics which apply over a long period of years, rather than a short period of years. Physicians and medical scientists should do nothing with the idea of temporarily doing good which, when carried out repeatedly over a period of time, would debase and jeopardize a method for doing good. If a medical scientist breaks the code of medical ethics and says, “Kill the person,” in order to do what he thinks may be good, in the course of time that will grow and will cause a loss of faith of the public in the medical profession, and hence destroy the capacity of the medical profession to do its good for society. The reason that we must be very careful in the use of human beings as subjects in medical experiments is in order not to debase and jeopardize this method for doing great good by causing the public to react against it.