Reality and revisionism: new evidence for Andrew C Ivy's claim to authorship of the Nuremberg Code.

Maurice H Pappworth (1910–1994) was an English physician who had developed a deep concern for the ethics of human research. In 1966, while researching his book – Human Guinea Pigs, which would be published the following year1 – he wrote to Ivy regarding experimentation on prisoners. Andrew C Ivy (1893–1978) was an eminent physician and physiologist and according to Moreno2 ‘by the end of the war he was probably…the most famous doctor in the country [US]…the prototype of today’s media medical expert’. Perhaps because of this status, and the fact that he had been actively involved in research involving prison inmates, he had been invited to serve as the American Medical Association’s (AMA) adviser to the Nuremberg prosecutors (Figure 1). Ivy responded to Pappworth’s enquiry3 on 6 April 1966 and began by stating: I was considering the subject of your letter before I testified at Nuremberg and gave the Judges my Version of the Code thus indicating from the outset his involvement. In his letter, he told Pappworth that he had been interested in research ethics since 1917 and that he had always tried to apply the ‘Golden Rule’ as a guiding principle in all his own research, that is that you should only do to others that which you would allow them to do to you. He indicated finally his belief that the natural extension of this principle was that you should always take your ‘own “Medicine” first’.3 This allusion to self-experimentation as a preliminary and necessary step in research becomes relevant when we consider Ivy’s appendix to the letter. Open in a separate window Figure 1. Andrew C Ivy being sworn in at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, June 1947. Source: Photo courtesy of the National Archives RG 238 OMT-1-W-60.