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Tag: Clinical Trials

Medicine in Exile after the Spanish Civil War: A Clinical Trial in a French Concentration Camp, 1939-1940


Auscultation of an internee at the Bram Concentration Camp (Aude, France, 1939).
Image courtesy of: ESPAÑA. MINISTERIO DE EDUCACIÓN, CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. Archivo Centelles. Foto.9380

Written by Àlvar Martínez-Vidal and Xavier García-Ferrandis.

In concentration camps organised in France to intern refugees who had fled Spain at the end of the Civil War (February 1939), a number of clinical trials were performed by Catalan doctors in order to provide health assistance to their compatriots in the most rational way possible.

This short paper focuses on one of these human experiments, which combined health care, clinical supervision and scientific research. It was not the only clinical trial of this kind performed in such strange circumstances, but it was the most significant.

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