Henry Knowles Beecher

Henry Knowles Beecher (born February 4, 1904, Kansas, U.S.—died July 25, 1976, Boston, Massachusetts) was an American anesthesiologist and researcher who was an outspoken advocate of ethical standards in human-subjects research and a pioneer in the study of pain, analgesia, and clinical trials that took into account the placebo effect. He also was influential in the growth of anesthesiology as an independent medical specialty.

Beecher was the second of three children born to Henry Eugene and Mary Unangst. He spent his early youth in Peck, Kansas, and in 1918 moved to Wichita. After living briefly in Phoenix, Arizona, Beecher returned to Wichita and enrolled at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, where in 1926 he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and, shortly thereafter, a master’s degree. It was about this time that he changed his surname to Beecher (he had earlier chosen Henry as his formal first name). In 1928 Beecher went to Massachusetts, having enrolled at Harvard Medical School; he earned a medical degree there four years later. After receiving early surgical training at Massachusetts General Hospital, Beecher received a fellowship to study with Danish physiologist August Krogh, which allowed him to pursue his interest in research.

Beecher was appointed chief of anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1936, despite having had no formal education in the field. In 1941 he was named the Dorr Professor of Research in Anaesthesia at Harvard University, the first endowed chair of anesthesia in the world. Beecher’s career was interrupted by service in World War II, when he observed pain responses of battle-wounded soldiers to be quantitatively different from those of surgical patients. Later Beecher compared morphine and a placebo (an agent that produces a nonspecific effect) to investigate the involvement of psychological factors in the physiology of pain control. He was one of the first to recognize the importance of double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials (in which neither subject nor doctor know whether the subject will receive a drug or a placebo)..

Beecher also described ethical issues associated with human experimentation. He argued for informed consent by research subjects, and he condemned research that did not demonstrate potential benefits to patients as ethically unjustifiable. His landmark 1966 article in The New England Journal of Medicine cited 22 examples of ethical infractions involving human subjects and, consequently, stimulated many U.S. researchers to obtain informed consent prior to experiments.