Semester:
Offered:
Sabine Hildebrandt (Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 23H 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
This seminar introduces students to the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as an extreme example of antisemitism and racism, and of crimes against humanity and genocide. These included medical crimes, which, thus far, are the most thoroughly documented examples of ethical transgressions of health care professionals. They include forced sterilizations, the “euthanasia” systematic murder program, and forced brutal medical experiments on the living and the dead. However, under conditions of oppression by the same political system, some health care professionals chose to retain the healing powers of medicine.
Anatomy in Nazi Germany is a model for ethical transgressions in the medical sciences that reveals the complex relationships between scientists and the Nazi regime. Changes of the traditional anatomical body procurement manifested in the use of many bodies of Nazi victims in teaching and scientific investigations. Research gradually moved from routine studies to murder, from the anatomy lab to the Nazi prison system and then to the concentration camps. Ultimately, anatomists were complicit with the government through their role in the complete destruction of the perceived “enemies” of the Nazi regime.
This history of medicine can thus serve as a model for the recognition of patterns and common roots with other histories of discrimination, oppression, and atrocities. Also, there are continuities and legacies from this history that reach into the present and have relevance for today’s education and practice in the health professions.