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Japanese medical schools conducted human experiments with animal blood during wartime, reports reveal

From Hankyoreh · () Korean

Translated from Korean, summarized and contextualized by DistantNews.

At a glance

News Named sources Context piece
  • Japanese medical schools conducted unethical human experiments using animal blood transfusions on patients during the Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars.
  • Experiments involved injecting preserved blood, mismatched blood, and animal blood, leading to patient deaths.
  • Researchers suggest these experiments aimed to find battlefield transfusion methods, possibly facilitated by the government's wartime needs.

Japanese medical universities conducted unethical human experiments involving transfusions of animal blood and other substances on patients during the Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, according to Japanese media reports.

Kyodo News revealed that between 1937 and the end of the Pacific War, several Japanese universities performed experiments injecting patients with preserved blood, blood from donors with different blood types, and animal blood. These findings were confirmed through research by Professor Takeshi Yoshinaka of Kyoto University's Faculty of Medicine and his joint investigation into papers published in medical journals of the era.

Many of these experiments were attempts to test transfusion methods applicable on the battlefield, which led to deaths.

— Kyodo NewsReporting on the findings of human experimentation during wartime.

The experiments, conducted by institutions including Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, Kyushu Imperial University (now Kyushu University), and Kumamoto Medical College (now Kumamoto University), resulted in multiple fatalities. A patient undergoing brain surgery died after receiving a transfusion of horse blood. A nine-year-old boy with osteomyelitis died after receiving expired plasma. Another death occurred when a hospital official transfused preserved horse blood into a patient at a hospital in Nanjing, China, during the war.

Kyodo News reported that many of these experiments were attempts to test transfusion methods applicable on the battlefield, which led to deaths. Yoshinaka suggested that the experiments were seen as a means to develop treatment methods at the time and that the universities' cooperation with the government's war efforts may have lowered the ethical threshold for such non-consensual human experimentation.

At the time, these experiments appear to have been seen as a way to develop treatment methods. The ethical threshold for unethical human experiments may have been lowered as medical universities cooperated with the government's war efforts.

— Takeshi YoshinakaProfessor at Kyoto University's Faculty of Medicine, commenting on the context and motivations behind the experiments.
DistantNews Editorial

Originally published by Hankyoreh in Korean. Translated, summarized, and contextualized by our editorial team with added local perspective. Read our editorial standards.

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