#4 Unethical Practices followed by Denis and Semmelweis

After going through the text, we realized all the troubles and hardship that Denis and Semmelweis had to overcome. Though they had different way of gathering a information. And on their way to gather information, they made lots of ethical breaches and followed unethical research practice.

Animal poaching in Africa.

Armand Denis indirectly supported animal hunting and poaching. No animals should be hurt during a research. Armand Denis also bribed to collect information. There are two instances where Armand Denis bribed people.

He promised Pigneys with Tobacco in order to get information and to convince them to help him in his hunt of elephant king.
Also in order to get the skull of that elephant, which was supposed to have four tusks, he had to promise the "African" guy with stuffs like Flash light and other things.

On the other hand, Semmelweis treated pregnant women as test subjects. He subjected healthy women for his experimental verification. He was trying to verify whether the childbed fever was caused by un-washed hands. Physicians in that hospital were exposing the infection, unknowingly, to the women in labor. They were not washing their hands after performing autopsy. That was how they acted as a carrier of the infection.

Experiments being conducted on human.

Even if they were doing research to get to a conclusion, they happen to do ethical breaches and followed unethical research practices.





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