Human Experimentation In The Birthmark By Nathaniel Hawthorne

The “Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a story that I know can still appeal to the current day and especially in the past history. The story takes place at a time when scientific discoveries and experiments were going on to try and have an understanding for everything since at the time scientist were very curious about almost everything. Unfortunately one of the experiments they would conduct were on humans. From the Story “The Birthmark” we easily learn that human experimentation is very frowned upon and that it almost can always lead to death for the person being experimented on. The articles that I will use in this essay are articles that help support my argument that human experimentation still goes on today and that they also relate
We have seen this issue become a huge problem from previous wars, especially from World War 2. During World War 2 the Nazi’s performed gruesome and cruel experiments on the Jewish people they had captured in their concentration camps. These experiments ranged from decapitating people without anesthesia to try and sew the leg or arm back on to see if it was possible for the participant to live to trying to change the eye color of the pupil just because they had a curiosity for these experimentations similar to Aylmer In the story. In an article posted on The New England Journal of Medicine website by Dr. Paul Appelbaum. He does a review on a book called Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans Written by Vivien Spitz. The review of the book recalls how Vivien Spitz was a Court Reporter at the famous Nuremberg Trials and would interview witnesses and hear their horrible stories from the experiments they went through or experienced. A quote from the article states “Sections of bone and entire limbs were removed from healthy inmates and then “Transplanted” into other victims” These experiments demonstrated how the calling of medicine was corrupted at the time of the war but also at the time the story “The Birthmark” was written. The whole point of the German’s trying to eliminate the Jewish
A big thing that appealed to both the story and an article that I have described is moral. In the story it was morally wrong for what Alymer was trying to do for Georgina in removing the birthmark because it was what made her soul or character. In the Article of the Chinese Head Transplant a big issue with the procedure going on is whether it is morally right to put someone else’s head on another person’s body because spiritually and physically it won’t be the same person as before. Moral plays a big play in these scenes because if moral was an issue they would have choose to not proceed with the procedures, but they do so anyways. For Alymer the results of the experiment ended up costing the life of his wife that he never got to admire for who she was because his temptation overwhelmed him. This ultimately shows how our natural drive and curiosity for these things intervenes from what is right and wrong as it blinds your vision since you can only focus on that one thing. Unfortunately we can stop all the human experimentations that go on in the present day since a majority of them are conducted in secret location or facilities. We can only imagine what the experiment is and what information the person conducting the experiment is trying to