Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich

Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich PDF Author: John J. Michalczyk
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9781556127526
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Amid all contemporary discussion of ethical issues in science, many ethicists, historians, Holocaust specialists and medical professionals strongly feel that we should understand the past in order to make more enlightened ethical decisions.

Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich

Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich PDF Author: John J. Michalczyk
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9781556127526
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Amid all contemporary discussion of ethical issues in science, many ethicists, historians, Holocaust specialists and medical professionals strongly feel that we should understand the past in order to make more enlightened ethical decisions.

Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany

Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany PDF Author: Francis R. Nicosia
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 085745692X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
The participation of German physicians in medical experiments on innocent people and mass murder is one of the most disturbing aspects of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Six distinguished historians working in this field are addressing the critical issues raised by these murderous experiments, such as the place of the Holocaust in the larger context of eugenic and racial research, the motivation and roles of the German medical establishment, and the impact and legacy of the eugenics movements and Nazi medical practice on physicians and medicine since World War II. Based on the authors' original scholarship, these essays offer an excellent and very accessible introduction to an important and controversial subject. They are also particularly relevant in light of current controversies over the nature and application of research in human genetics and biotechnology.

Racial Hygiene

Racial Hygiene PDF Author: Robert Proctor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674745780
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
This book focuses on how scientists themselves participated in the construction of Nazi racial policy. Proctor demonstrates that many of the political initiatives of the Nazis arose from within the scientific community, and that medical scientists actively designed and administered key elements of National Socialist policy.

Death of Medicine in Nazi Germany

Death of Medicine in Nazi Germany PDF Author: Wolfgang Weyers
Publisher: Madison Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Only one generation ago, the world watched as highly trained physicians abandoned medical ethics in response to the Nazi regime. Weyers' book takes an in-depth look at the circumstances which allowed this to happen and the steps necessary to ensure such genocide never happens again.

The Anatomy of Murder

The Anatomy of Murder PDF Author: Sabine Hildebrandt
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785330683
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As historian and anatomist Sabine Hildebrandt reveals, however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the “future dead.”

Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia

Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia PDF Author: Sheldon Rubenfeld
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793609500
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Unlike Nazi medical experiments, euthanasia during the Third Reich is barely studied or taught. Often, even asking whether euthanasia during the Third Reich is relevant to contemporary debates about physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia is dismissed as inflammatory. Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: Before, During, and After the Holocaust explores the history of euthanasia before and during the Third Reich in depth and demonstrate how Nazi physicians incorporated mainstream Western philosophy, eugenics, population medicine, prevention, and other medical ideas into their ideology. This book reveals that euthanasia was neither forced upon physicians nor wantonly practiced by a few fanatics, but widely embraced by Western medicine before being sanctioned by the Nazis. Contributors then reflect on the significance of this history for contemporary debates about PAS and euthanasia. While they take different views regarding these practices, almost all agree that there are continuities between the beliefs that the Nazis used to justify euthanasia and the ideology that undergirds present-day PAS and euthanasia. This conclusion leads our scholars to argue that the history of Nazi medicine should make society wary about legalizing PAS or euthanasia and urge caution where it has been legalized.

Doctors Under Hitler

Doctors Under Hitler PDF Author: Michael H. Kater
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 9780807848586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
In this history of medicine and the medical profession in the Third Reich, Michael Kater examines the career patterns, educational training, professional organization, and political socialization of German physicians under Hitler. His discussion ranges wi

The Nazi War on Cancer

The Nazi War on Cancer PDF Author: Robert Proctor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691187819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Collaboration in the Holocaust. Murderous and torturous medical experiments. The "euthanasia" of hundreds of thousands of people with mental or physical disabilities. Widespread sterilization of "the unfit." Nazi doctors committed these and countless other atrocities as part of Hitler's warped quest to create a German master race. Robert Proctor recently made the explosive discovery, however, that Nazi Germany was also decades ahead of other countries in promoting health reforms that we today regard as progressive and socially responsible. Most startling, Nazi scientists were the first to definitively link lung cancer and cigarette smoking. Proctor explores the controversial and troubling questions that such findings raise: Were the Nazis more complex morally than we thought? Can good science come from an evil regime? What might this reveal about health activism in our own society? Proctor argues that we must view Hitler's Germany more subtly than we have in the past. But he also concludes that the Nazis' forward-looking health activism ultimately came from the same twisted root as their medical crimes: the ideal of a sanitary racial utopia reserved exclusively for pure and healthy Germans. Author of an earlier groundbreaking work on Nazi medical horrors, Proctor began this book after discovering documents showing that the Nazis conducted the most aggressive antismoking campaign in modern history. Further research revealed that Hitler's government passed a wide range of public health measures, including restrictions on asbestos, radiation, pesticides, and food dyes. Nazi health officials introduced strict occupational health and safety standards, and promoted such foods as whole-grain bread and soybeans. These policies went hand in hand with health propaganda that, for example, idealized the Führer's body and his nonsmoking, vegetarian lifestyle. Proctor shows that cancer also became an important social metaphor, as the Nazis portrayed Jews and other "enemies of the Volk" as tumors that must be eliminated from the German body politic. This is a disturbing and profoundly important book. It is only by appreciating the connections between the "normal" and the "monstrous" aspects of Nazi science and policy, Proctor reveals, that we can fully understand not just the horror of fascism, but also its deep and seductive appeal even to otherwise right-thinking Germans.

Nurses in Nazi Germany

Nurses in Nazi Germany PDF Author: Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691221405
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This book tells the story of German nurses who, directly or indirectly, participated in the Nazis' "euthanasia" measures against patients with mental and physical disabilities, measures that claimed well over 100,000 victims from 1939 to 1945. How could men and women who were trained to care for their patients come to kill or assist in murder or mistreatment? This is the central question pursued by Bronwyn McFarland-Icke as she details the lives of nurses from the beginning of the Weimar Republic through the years of National Socialist rule. Rather than examine what the Party did or did not order, she looks into the hearts and minds of people whose complicity in murder is not easily explained with reference to ideological enthusiasm. Her book is a micro-history in which many of the most important ethical, social, and cultural issues at the core of Nazi genocide can be addressed from a fresh perspective. McFarland-Icke offers gripping descriptions of the conditions and practices associated with psychiatric nursing during these years by mining such sources as nursing guides, personnel records, and postwar trial testimony. Nurses were expected to be conscientious and friendly caretakers despite job stress, low morale, and Nazi propaganda about patients' having "lives unworthy of living." While some managed to cope with this situation, others became abusive. Asylum administrators meanwhile encouraged nurses to perform with as little disruption and personal commentary as possible. So how did nurses react when ordered to participate in, or tolerate, the murder of their patients? Records suggest that some had no conflicts of conscience; others did as they were told with regret; and a few refused. The remarkable accounts of these nurses enable the author to re-create the drama taking place while sharpening her argument concerning the ability and the willingness to choose.

Recognizing the Past in the Present

Recognizing the Past in the Present PDF Author: Sabine Hildebrandt
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789207851
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Following decades of silence about the involvement of doctors, medical researchers and other health professionals in the Holocaust and other National Socialist (Nazi) crimes, scholars in recent years have produced a growing body of research that reveals the pervasive extent of that complicity. This interdisciplinary collection of studies presents documentation of the critical role medicine played in realizing the policies of Hitler’s regime. It traces the history of Nazi medicine from its roots in the racial theories of the 1920s, through its manifestations during the Nazi period, on to legacies and continuities from the postwar years to the present.