06.27.07

Are madmen easily recognized?

Posted in Anything goes, History, Uncategorized at 4:52 pm by Administrator

While at the library the other day, I stumbled upon a book called, When Medicine Went Mad, Bioethics and the Holocaust, edited by Arthur L. Caplan. The book compiles writings from more than a dozen people, including Holocaust survivors, expressing their viewpoints on the medical involvement during and before the Holocaust. One major question was whether the information gathered should be used today or discarded. Those who expressed their views wrote of either their research or personal experience. I found it enlightening. Although I know the history of the Holocaust is not a pleasant one to revisit, I do feel that history is very important. History should not be forgotten because all too often, history repeats itself. Even Luke in the Bible tells us, “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be again.”

When Medicine Went Mad exposes a lot of very eye-opening details for me. About a year ago, I wrote a post on a video I watched dealing with Nazi medicine. It was from that video I first learned of the idea that “eugenics” was embraced in America “before” it was so widely implemented in Germany. That bit of information surprised me because I had not known that. I don’t recall ever learning that in school. Why have I rarely heard anyone discuss this? Are we too busy entertaining ourselves to not notice the plight of others, or is it as the book says, a “taboo” subject which ought not be discussed? There are other similar horrific events happening in our modern world. Do these things continue to happen as a result of us not discussing them or exposing them?
The first three accounts in When Medicine Went Mad are testimonies from Holocaust survivors. Eva Mozes Kor, Sara Seiler Vigorito, and Gisela Konopka bring to light inhumane experiments conducted during the Holocaust. These were done without consent (and often without the “subjects’” knowledge), without anesthesia, in total disregard for the subjects’ mental and physical needs, etc. Therefore, the argument goes, results of their experiments should be destroyed and not used as part of research materials for medical purposes (or any other purpose for that matter). I had only very fleetingly grappled with this idea. I am at a bit at a toss up since that information is now available. Shouldn’t we use it?

The following is what Gisela Konopka wrote regarding that question:

“In the concentration camp I saw a man hunted to death by making him run, fall down, get up, and run again until the blood spurted out of his mouth. Perhaps someone could develop “scientific” data on how long it takes for a lung to burst!
“By the way, all those immense discoveries in the hypothermia data do not seem so great to me. I knew already as a teenager (before the Nazis) that to drink alcohol and fall asleep in the snow may bring death.

“I consider it inexcusable to dignify those murderers with the word ’scientist’ or dignify what they did with the word ‘research.’”

I still have yet to read the articles on the hypothermia experiments, so will reserve comment on that at this time. But I did feel that Gisela made a good point. How valuable is the information that was gathered from the Nazi medical experiments? Could that information have been learned humanely? How has any of it benefited us today, if at all? It brings to mind the animal experiments that have continued on today, and particularly recently, the experiments done on primates to study brain trauma. Granted, I do feel that animals and humans are not exactly equal, but according to the Bible, A righteous man regards the life of his animal, But the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. The article which followed Gisela’s was written by Robert N. Proctor, entitled Nazi Biomedical Policies. Among the many interesting details he shared, one that I found noteworthy in regards to the use of Nazi medical experiments was the number of journals housed in American medical libraries, which published their findings. Proctor wrote:

“. . . In the case of medicine, it is interesting that there is no massive exodus from the editorial boards of medical journals in the period 1932-1935. Medical journals did not close their doors. If you go to the New York Academy of Medicine, Stanford’s Lane Library, or any other major medical library, you can find more than 150 German medical journals published continuously through the Nazi period–more than 100 meters of shelf space of journals! Few medical journals ceased publication in the early years of the regime; most of those that did cease publication did not close until the mid-war years. In fact, some 30 odd new medical journals begin publishing during the Nazi period. Several of these are still published today.”

Any medical doctor or student or any persons with access to those journals could see what was being done in Germany during those years in regards to their medical experiments and practices. Germany not only obtained some of their ideas from America, but their subsequent activities were not hidden, either, but actually accepted. In Eva Mozes Kor’s testimony she describes how it was common for twins to be injected with substances which they did not know what they were. Years later, they were developing mysterious incurable diseases. If they could find their files from Auschwitz, it might help the doctors find a cure. Do these files still exist? With what were they being injected? Perhaps some clues could be found in the volumes of literature housed in our American medical libraries?

As mentioned earlier, America was actually a role model for Germany. Proctor wrote:

“I should also mention that it was the U.S. that provided the most important model for German sterilization laws. By the late 1920’s, 15,000 individuals had been sterilized in the U.S. –most while incarcerated in prisons or homes for the mentally ill. Nearly half of these took place in California–most of the others in northern states (not, as one might have expected , in the South). German racial hygienists throughout the Weimar period expressed their envy of American achievements in this area, warning that unless the Germans made progress in this field, America would become the world’s racial leader.”

And another example:

“In subsequent years, racial hygienists looked to other aspects of American racial policy for instruction. Nazi physicians on more than one occasion argued that German racial policies were relatively liberal compared with the way blacks were treated in the U.S. Evidence for this was usually taken from the fact that in several southern states, a person with 1/32 black ancestry was legally black, whereas if someone was 1/8 Jewish in Germany (and for many purposes, 1/4 Jewish), that person was legally Aryan. Nazi physicians spent a great deal of time discussing American miscegenation legislation; German medical journals reproduced charts showing the states in which blacks could or could not marry whites could or could not vote, and so forth.

“In 1939, Germany’s leading racial hygiene journal reported that the University of Missouri had refused to admit black students. The same year, the journal reported the recent refusal of the American Medical Association to admit black physicians to its membership. German physicians had only recently (in 1938) barred Jews from practicing medicine (except on other Jews); racial theorists were thereby able to argue that Germany was not alone it is efforts to preserve racial purity.”

Wow, not even 100 years have passed, and I have an inkling that most people aren’t aware of that part of our history. How much more of history has been lost? There is much more information like this in When Medicine Went Mad. And although I’m not trying to make excuses for what happened in Germany in the early 1900s, I see that we American’s have a shameful past as well. Granted we did not gas thousands of people to death, but with the prevailing ideologies of the time, it sure looks like we were heading into a collision course. We allowed it and even applauded it. And as Gisela wrote, even using the excuse that American’s did it, too, is not a good excuse for what happened in Germany during those years which culminated into the murder of millions of people. Those Nazi doctors were not mad men, but normal citizens who went to work (experimenting on human beings), then went home at night to their wives and kids. All in a day’s work.

Have we become desensitized to this all as well, since we allow government funded abortions to be performed by the thousands in the name of “freedom of choice?” We push for our pharmaceutical companies to churn out more and more drugs and procedures for our ailments, which are first tested on citizens of third-world countries, while we turn our heads? We are only too happy to receive our drugs without a thought as to what was the process by which those drugs and procedures were procured/developed and tested. We rationalize that fetal stem cells are not “really” human, “yet.” The end justifies the means? What has happened to us, or has humanity always been this way? Is that why God inspired a book (the Bible) for us to teach us a simple concept of loving one another? More and more I feel that God inspired the Bible to tell us things that we would not know apart from it. And yet, some even twist the lessons in the Bible to blame God for all our evil ways and thoughts. It appears that we don’t even realize much of the time when we are being evil and unloving towards our brothers.

There’s so much more information in the first few articles I read that I did not know. Perhaps I’ll share more of it in another post after I’ve finished reading the book. How much of history should we know, and should any of it be forgotten? Is the advancement of science truly more important than humanity, or is science supposed to “serve” humanity?
Marlakins

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