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Medical Ethics and the Nazi Legacy
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10478 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
3,496 Words |
| Author
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Stephen G. Post
Stephen G. Post is assistant professor of medical humanities
at the Center for Biomedical Ethics, Case Western Reserve
University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio. |
THE NAZI DOCTORS AND THE NUREMBERG CODE
Human Rights in Human Experimentation
George J. Annas, Michael A. Grodin, editors
New York: Oxford University Press, 1992
371 pp., $29.95
How did the Nazi physicians, classically held to the Hippocratic precept, "Above all, do no harm," sink into the moral abyss of torturous experiments on human subjects, and is this descent relevant to current medical ethics?
The very ones entrusted with comfort, care, the relief of pain, and the restoration of health became the agents of callous indifference, torture, and death. Thus did Nazi doctors descend into the hideous destructions of the humanity that they were sworn to save. For three decades, German medicine had been the envy of the world and the model for American medical education, research, and clinical practice. Then, tried for war crimes by the military tribunal at Nuremberg, fifteen doctors of infamy were hanged or imprisoned.
Racial hygiene
This book begins with chapters by two prominent historians, both concerned with how German physicians were attracted so early to the Nazi party, and vice versa. Robert Procter, a leading American historian and author of the critically acclaimed book Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (1988), argues persuasively that the physicians were not swept into the Nazi movement against their wills, duped victims of a political power. Rather, physicians were active leaders in the early formation of the Nazi movement, where they found deep support for their genetic theories of human perfection. At the end of the nineteenth century, German social Darwinists, fearful of the deterioration of the race, developed the theory of racial hygiene, or purification, to be implemented by combating the breeding of "inferiors." American physicians in academic medical centers were deeply influenced by these ideas.
German geneticists, psychiatrists, and other proponents of racial hygienics were not at first anti-Semitic, but shortly after World War I the conservative and nationalistic anti-Semitic press J.F. Lehmann Verlag took over publication of the major racial hygiene journal. By 1930, leading racial hygienists were praising Hitler as the first important politician to take their theories seriously. Nazi leaders in turn referred to national
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