Henry K. Beecher

Henry Knowles Beecher (born February 4, 1904 in Wichita (Kansas) as Harry Unangst , † July 25, 1976 in Boston ) was an American pioneer of anesthesia and professor at Harvard Medical School . He is known for his work on the placebo effect . In addition, a 1966 article in the New England Journal of Medicine about unethical practices in medical experimentation was instrumental in the implementation of guidelines on human experimentation and informed consent . Criticism was later also voiced that he himself was involved in human experiments with psychoactive substances for American secret services.

Life

youth

Beecher was born in 1904 and changed his last name to Beecher in his 20s. The reasons for this are unknown, but with this name change he made his name easier to remember, which was borne by the popularity of the Beecher family, such as the preacher Henry Ward Beecher or the author Harriet Beecher Stowe . In fact, however, he was not related to the Beecher family.

education

Beecher earned a bachelor's degree in 1926 and a master's degree in 1927 in physical chemistry from the University of Kansas . During his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Paris-Sorbonne , he was “persuaded” to study medicine instead . In 1928 he switched to Harvard Medical School , where he received a research fellowship from 1929 to 1931. Beecher completed his doctorate in 1932 with cum laude .

Two of his articles, published in the Journal of Applied Physiology in 1933, were awarded the Warren Triennial Prize. It was through these two articles, as well as Beecher's work during his senior year at college, that he became aware of Edward Delos Churchill , professor of surgery at the University of Harvard, and Beecher's mentor . As a post graduate , he received two years surgical training at Churchill's Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). In 1935 he traveled to Denmark to work in the laboratory for physiology of Nobel Prize winner August Krogh .

Career

After returning to the United States in 1936, he was appointed chief anesthetist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and was supervised by Dr. Churchill was hired as an anesthesia instructor at Harvard Medical School. In 1939 Beecher became an assistant professor and in 1941 was the first anesthetist in the USA to receive an endowed professor, which was awarded by Henry Isaiah Dorr Professor of Anesthesia Research .

During the Second World War , Beecher served in the US Army in North Africa and Italy as a military doctor with the rank of first lieutenant. He received five Battle Star awards and in 1945 the Legion of Merit.

His experience at the war with clinical pharmacology inspired him to investigate placebo-like phenomena.

In 1967 he became chairman of the research committee at MGH and a member of the general executive committee. In 1969 he retired from MGH and in 1970 he also retired from Harvard Medical School.

Activities for the secret services

After a SWR documentary by Egmont R. Koch (Torture Experts - The Secret Methods of the CIA, 2007), a book by Koch and an essay by Alfred W. McCoy , Beecher evaluated the medical experiments in German concentration camps for US agencies - especially for them Mescaline as a "truth drug" by Kurt Plötner in the Dachau concentration camp. In post-war Germany, Beecher was the scientific director of the CIA's medical experiments on "truth drugs" ( mescaline and LSD ). These were carried out in a secret CIA prison called "Villa Schuster" (later renamed "Haus Waldhof" ) in Kronberg near Frankfurt. This was closely related to the Camp King interrogation center in western Germany. According to a witness report, some of the people interrogated died during the experiments. This report states that Becher had been at Camp King regularly since 1951, preparing human experiments. Together with the interrogation specialists of the CIA, the so-called “rough boys”, Beecher thought about further experiments and advised the testing of various drugs. He also worked with the former general practitioner Walter Paul Schreiber , who was involved in human experiments in concentration camps under the National Socialists , in order to "exchange ideas". Beecher later described Schreiber as “intelligent and cooperative” in a report. According to Koch, in January 1953, a depressed patient fell into a deep coma and died after being given a mescaline injection on Beecher's advice at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Hospital .

Beecher's work contributed to the Kubark manuals .

plant

Beecher and the placebo effect

Beecher is best known for his article The Powerful Placebo in the Journal of the American Medical Association from 1955 on the "placebo effect". However, he was not the first to introduce the term or to deal with it (see history of the placebo ). As early as 1920, TC Graves wrote about the “placebo effect.” The importance of Beecher's article was that it emphasized the need for double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. Beecher also correctly divided people into those who react to placebos (“placebo reactors”) or who do not react (“placebo non-reactors”). Beecher concluded that 35% of patients responded to the placebo effect.

Beecher's article became the most cited article on the placebo effect and the beginning of the scientific debate, even if Beecher's results were questioned in the 1990s and 2000s. He encountered the effect during his time as a military doctor when he saw that soldiers wounded in combat sometimes had no pain sensation for hours. Beecher sometimes injected saline solution in the field when he ran out of morphine to relieve pain, apparently achieving a similar analgesic effect.

Medical ethics

As a professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School, Beecher published an article in 1966 that drew attention to 22 representative examples of unethical clinical research that risked patient lives.

This led to investigations in Congress , as well as criticism from medical colleagues who saw an unfair generalization based on a few cases.

After the article was published, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration changed their testing guidelines, which require peer-reviewed and proof of consent for all human experiments. This article prompted the creation of ethics committees and informed consent as standards that were refined and monitored.

His report on coma patients and brain death was also influential.

Awards and memberships

Beecher received the MGH's Warren Triennial Prizes in 1931 and 1937 and was counted among the 15 “Outstanding Alumni” at the MGH's 150th anniversary. In 1955 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1974 he became a knight of the Dannebrog Order . He was the founder and president of the Association of University Anesthetists . Harvard Medical School awards the Henry K. Beecher Prize in Medical Ethics annually.

The Danish anesthetist and co-founder of intensive care medicine Björn Ibsen is one of his students .

Fonts

• The physiology of anesthesia. Oxford University Press, 1938.
• Resuscitation and anesthesia for wounded men; the management of traumatic shock. Thomas, Springfield, IL 1949.
• Principles, problems, and practices of anesthesia for thoracic surgery. Thomas, Springfield, IL 1952 and 1958.
• Experimentation in man. Thomas, Springfield, IL 1959.
• Measurement of Subjective Responses: Quantitative Effects of Drugs. Oxford University Press, 1959.
• Research and the Individual: Human Studies. Little, Brown, Boston 1970
• The Powerful Placebo. In: Journal of the American Medical Association. Volume 159, 1955, No. 17, p. 1602 ( pdf ).
• Ethics and Clinical Research. In: New England Journal of Medicine. Volume 274, June 1966, p. 367 ( pdf ).
• with Mark D. Altschule: Medicine at Harvard: the first three hundred years. University Press of New England, Hanover 1977.

literature

• J. Gravenstein: Henry K. Beecher: The Introduction of Anesthesia into the University. In: Anesthesiology. Volume 88, 1998, pp. 245-253.
• Vincent J. Kopp: Henry K. Beecher, MD: Contrarian (1904-1976). Newsletter, American Society of Anesthesiologists, September 1999.
• Vincent J. Kopp: Henry Knowles Beecher and the redefinition of death , Bull Anesth Hist., Vol. 15, 1997, pp. 6-8.
• Vincent J. Kopp: Henry Knowles Beecher and the development of informed consent in anesthesia research , Anesthesiology, Volume 90, 1999, pp. 1756-1765.

Web links

• Biography at the MGH

Individual evidence

1. ^ JS Gravenstein: Henry K. Beecher: The Introduction of Anesthesia into the University. Archived from the original on October 14, 2014. In: Anesthesiology . January 1998, pp. 245-253. doi : 10.1097 / 00000542-199801000-00033 . PMID 9447878 . Retrieved February 21, 2016.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o} Vincent J. Kopp (MD): Henry K. Beecher, MD: Contrarian (1904-1976). 1999, archived from the original on November 19, 2000 ; accessed on July 11, 2015 . 
3. ^ Henry Knowles Beecher (American anesthesiologist and researcher). Encyclopedia Britannica , accessed July 11, 2015 . 
4. ^ Farnsworth Fowle: HENRY K. BEECHER, DOCTOR IN BOSTON; Won World Fame for Work in Anesthesia and Ethics. The New York Times , July 26, 1976, accessed July 11, 2015 . 
5. ^ Henry K. Beecher: Laying Ethical Foundations for Informed Consent . In: New England Journal of Medicine . 274, No. 24, June 16, 1966, pp. 1374-1360. Republished with explanations in Public Health Classics in Jon Harkness, Susan E. Lederer, Daniel Wikler: Laying Ethical Foundations for Clinical Research . In: Bulletin of the World Health Organization . 79, No. 4, 2001, pp. 365-372. PMID 11357216 . PMC 2566394 (free full text).
6. ↑ Jonathan D. Moreno, Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans , Routledge, 2000, p. 241
7. ↑ ^{a b c d} Museum at Mass General. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on February 22, 2015 ; Retrieved July 11, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
8. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Egmont R. Koch, Michael Wech: Code name artichoke. The CIA's secret human experiments. Bertelsmann 2003.
9. ^ ^{A b c d} Alfred W. McCoy: Science in Dachau's shadow: HEBB, Beecher, and the development of CIA psychological torture and modern medical ethics . In: Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences . tape 43 , no. 4 , September 2007, pp. 401–417 , doi : 10.1002 / jhbs.20271 ( PDF [accessed December 28, 2014]).
10. ↑ US Naval Technical Mission in Europe, Technical report no. 331-45: "German aviation medical research at the Dachau concentration camp" (Oct. 1945), for example in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine of the Harvard Medical Library
11. ↑ see also Beecher's CIA file, the so-called “ Beecher Report”, p. 11
12. ^ TC Graves: Commentary on a case of Hystero-epilepsy with delayed puberty . In: The Lancet . 1920, p. 1135. Retrieved April 19, 2014.
13. ↑ In his book from 1970 with the title Research and the Individual: Human Studies , Beecher only speaks of “placebos”.
14. ↑ Klaus Koch: Placebo, a myth is disenchanted . In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt. 98, 2001, pp. 34-35. It refers to a Danish study by Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, Peter C. Gøtzsche: Is the Placebo Powerless? In: New England Journal of Medicine . tape 344 , no. 21 , May 24, 2001, p. 1594-1602 , doi : 10.1056 / NEJM200105243442106 , PMID 11372012 . Beecher's study was already criticized in Gunver S. Kienle, Helmut Kiene: The Powerful Placebo Effect: Fact or Fiction? In: Journal of Clinical Epidemiology . tape 50 , no. December 12 , 1997, p. 1311-1318 , doi : 10.1016 / S0895-4356 (97) 00203-5 . They come to the conclusion that the studies used by Beecher do not show any placebo effect at all.
15. ↑ HK Beecher, Ethics and Clinical Research , New England Journal of Medicine. June 16, 1966
16. ^ A Definition of Irreversible Coma: Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death. JAMA, 205, 1968, pp. 85–88 ( pdf ( memento of the original from December 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove it Note. ).