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 Justin McCurry, The Guardian | 07.03.2024
Photo by Roméo A. on Unsplash
Japan’s supreme court has ordered the government to pay damages to dozens of people who were forcibly sterilised under a now-defunct eugenics law, saying the practice had violated their constitutional rights.
Wednesday’s ruling by...
By Katie LaGrone, WPTV | 06.28.2024
Image by National Cancer Institute from Unsplash
TAMPA, Fla. — A Tampa jury recently found the now-defunct Lung Institute in Tampa guilty of engaging in “deceptive or unfair practices” while it offered customers “valueless” stem cell therapy to treat incurable...
By Gilma Avalos, NBC | 07.03.2024
Image by Josh Appel from Unsplash
The dream of becoming parents is turning into a nightmare for hundreds of people caught up in a surrogacy money scandal.
Some of the individuals are facing infertility or medical challenges, seeing surrogacy as...
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 07.11.2024
Louise Perry’s recent article in The Spectator cautions against “The quiet return of eugenics,” a threat she locates in preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders. The technology is billed as a way for parents undergoing IVF to select which embryo to implant based on information about each embryo’s genetic risk factors and traits. These reports, she says, give parents “a very full picture of the adult that embryo could become”––from their child’s risk of developing different diseases to their “likely...