| Sumario: | The triumphalist recitation of the self-determination ideal in doctor–patient relations, which traces its lineage back to the 1947 Nuremberg trials of Nazi physicians, masks a darker legacy. Following 133 days of testimony about the barbarities committed by doctors in German concentration camps, the Nuremberg judges established the individual subject–patient armed with the principle of self-determination as the first line of defense against a recurrence of such inhuman activities. In so doing, they implied that the self-restraining decency of traditional embodiments of social authority could not be relied upon for protection of the individual. This same underlying sense of betrayal and helpless vulnerability can be seen to inform contemporary American invocations of the self-determination ideal in doctor–patient relations, most compellingly in current arguments for a right to physician-assisted suicide. It would appear that the most enduring legacy of the Nuremberg doctors' trial is the vision of once-trusted caretakers acting as heartless predators.
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