Medical education must include the field’s Nazi past, expert panel urges
By Gretchen Vogel,
Science
| 11. 10. 2023
All health care students worldwide should learn the history of medicine during the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, according to a report published Wednesday by The Lancet. The journal formed a commission in 2021 to explore how the lessons from that time could help improve medical education in the future. In its 50-page report, the commission highlights the stories of victims, perpetrators, collaborators, and resisters of Nazi crimes in the practice of medicine. These include the use of concentration camp prisoners in heinous medical experiments, widespread forced sterilizations, and “euthanasia” programs that murdered more than 200,000 people deemed mentally unfit, including children.
The report confronts the fact that the medical profession had one of the highest rates of Nazi party membership (more than half of Germany’s non-Jewish doctors joined the party) and also highlights doctors, midwives, and nurses who worked against the regime’s murderous practices. Among the report’s recommendations for future generations of medical personnel is the formation of an international professional organization focused on the issues and a digital library accessible in multiple languages to health care...
Related Articles
By Yelena Biberman and Jonathan D. Moreno, Bioethics Forum | 04.16.2024
A quiet biological revolution in warfare is underway. The genome is emerging as a new domain of conflict. The level of destruction that only nuclear weapons could previously achieve is fast becoming as accessible as a cyberattack.
Now for the...
By Eric Schmidt, TIME | 04.16.2024
Imagine a world where everything from plastics to concrete is produced from biomass. Personalized cell and gene therapies prevent pandemics and treat previously incurable genetic diseases. Meat is lab-grown; enhanced nutrient grains are climate-resistant. This is what the future could...
CGS is excited to announce the launch of a new anti-eugenics initiative that has been years in the making. Legacies of Eugenics in Science, Medicine, and Technology kicks off with a monthly essay series published at the Los Angeles Review of Books that will expose and contest the reemergence of eugenic ideas in contemporary health sciences, human biotechnology, public health, and medicine. Community and campus-based events featuring the authors are also being planned. The project is a collaboration among CGS...
By Jorge Barrera and Rachel Houlihan, CBC | 04.09.2024
A Canadian DNA laboratory knowingly delivered prenatal paternity test results that routinely identified the wrong biological fathers — ruling out the real dads — and left a trail of shattered lives around the globe, a CBC News investigation has found...