[Medical intervention and assault: On the legal foundations of informed consent in German surgery, 1892-1940].
The recent historiography of informed consent in German medicine has chiefly focused on the issue of consent to human experimentation. This paper widens the historical perspective by demonstrating that the foundations of the concept of informed consent to surgery were laid in German law around 1900. From the 1890s onwards a debate about the legal basis of surgical operations developed in response to cases of medical intervention without full consent. While surgeons were unwilling to accept a legal interpretation of non-consensual treatment as assault, jurists were divided over the issue. Whereas Carl Stooss (1849-1934) and Joseph Heimberger (1865-1927) and Ludwig von Bar (1836-1913), endorsed the view that consent was a crucial requirement for the legality of surgical operations. Moreover, the German Supreme Court (Reichsgericht) in Leipzig consistently emphasized in its decisions the necessity of patients' consent. From 1912 it dealt also with the question of adequate pre-operative information of patients. Despite pressures during the Third Reich to reduce patients' "rule" over their own body in favour of notions of the health of the Volk, the Supreme Court upheld the requirement of individual patient consent in two further decisions, in 1936 and 1940.
Maehle
Andreas-Holger
AH
D013502:General Surgery / Q000941:ethics* / Q000266:history*; D005858:Germany; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D007258:Informed Consent / Q000266:history* / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D008511:Medicine