# The Nuremberg judges set out the Nuremberg Code in the medical-trial judgment Date: 1947 ## The fact On 20 August 1947 the judgment in the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg included ten principles later called the Nuremberg Code, requiring voluntary consent for research on humans. The court was a U.S. military tribunal. The defendants were physicians and administrators. The Code is a completed judicial statement, not a Hippocratic autograph and not immediately binding as a global statute. ## Context Nazi human experiments had been dressed as science and public health. Traditional oaths had not stopped them. The tribunal answered with consent, risk limits, and the right to withdraw. Later the Declaration of Helsinki (1964) restated research ethics for associations. This Fact is the 1947 judgment points, not Helsinki. Hippocrates of Cos is not the sole author of every Greek medical treatise later copied under his name, and he is not the signer of every later oath or code that quoted him. Shared work with unnamed Coan practitioners, Alexandrian compilers, Galen, Latin printers, medical faculties, and twentieth-century medical associations does not erase the Cos identity Plato used, and it does not make a fifth-century physician the author of the 1948 Declaration of Geneva. ## Evidence and sources Library of Congress military-legal collections and USHMM’s Doctors’ Trial exhibition independently document the trial, the date, and the ethics points. They do not attribute the ten points to a Coan author. Official or archival record: Library of Congress — Nuremberg trials military-legal collection (https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/Nuremberg_trials.html; Library of Congress). ## Significance Initiating research-ethics path onto minority and prisoner protection. High confidence on the judgment. Implementation in national law is later and uneven. A code can sit in a judgment while later studies (Tuskegee was already running) ignore it. Those violations are separate Facts. A printed corpus does not vaccinate a child. An oath does not staff a clinic. ## What is established and what is not Established: the 1947 judgment set out the consent-centred code. Not established: that all later trials complied, or that [Hippocrates](/people/hippocrates) wrote a research-consent clause. What would change the picture: a contradictory autograph, a securely dated Coan inscription naming a different author, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions acting in his name. The documentary trail can name an office, printer, code, trial, or treatise heading; it cannot name a complete Coan patient register. Confidence belongs on the impact path. Estimates of later harm from humoral treatment, where historians publish them, are attributed to those historians, not invented here. A Cos vita, a medieval oath manuscript, a Venetian folio, and a twentieth-century medical-association code are different instruments even when they share a heading. Hippocrates’ contribution, where it exists, is the name and the later use of treatises grouped under that name, not a modern ministry signature. Sharing labour with printers, editors, prosecutors, or assemblies is not a reason to drop the row and not a reason to treat the row as a clinical trial. Readers who want a birth certificate, a patient register, or a unique coefficient onto a modern indicator will not find those things in this instrument, and the page should not pretend otherwise. The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit to Cos in the fifth century BCE. If a number of deaths, doses, or pupils is not in the official or independent record named above, it is not supplied here. ## People - Hippocrates: https://factrail.ai/people/hippocrates ## Drivers - Protection of Minority Rights: https://factrail.ai/drivers/protection-of-minority-rights ## Sources - https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/special-focus/doctors-trial - https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/Nuremberg_trials.html ## Methodology https://factrail.ai/methodology Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/nuremberg-code-1947