Anti-smoking campaigns… were eventually aimed exclusively at the “Aryans” – the Nazi ideal of the “master race.”
Nazi medical practices to be topic of Wednesday lecture
September 17, 2005
By the Lincoln Journal Star
The role of Nazi medical practices in the development of medical ethics and the lessons today’s physicians have learned from the period leading up to the Holocaust is the focus of a series of public lectures by the American Medical Association and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
A public lecture at 5 p.m. Wednesday at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Great Plains Art Museum at Hewit Place, will focus on how medical atrocities of the Holocaust have affected modern medical ethics.
The lecture, “The Nazis and Medical Ethics: Contexts and Lessons,” and a 4:30 p.m. reception are free and open to the public. The host for the event is the Humanities in Medicine program.
Alan Wells, an expert in medical ethics, and Patricia Heberer, historian at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will lead the discussion.
Nazi Germany has been described as a “biocracy,” a national culture that justified the killing of millions of “undesirable” individuals through appeals to pseudo-science and eugenics. Within this framework, healers became killers, and medical research evolved into torture.
An important impetus for medical ethics in the 20th century was international reactions against Nazi war crimes of a medical nature. World War II-era Germans were extremely advanced in medicine, technology and public health research, according to Wells, but those successes have largely been overlooked by history because of the medical extremes of the Holocaust.
For example, Germany was the first to have a high-powered electron microscope, the first to document the link between asbestos and lung cancer, and an innovator in developing high profile public health campaigns for a variety of health issues – such as anti-smoking campaigns and promoting breast self-examination to help detect tumors at an early stage. These advances and campaigns, however, were eventually aimed exclusively at the “Aryans” – the Nazi ideal of the “master race.”
Other lectures are planned for Sept. 20 in Omaha at the Jewish Community Center and at the Maimonides Society, an affinity group for Jewish health care professionals.
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