Lessons from ethics' darkest days: Remembering medicine's role in the Holocaust

A lecture from the AMA and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum remembers a time when the course of medical ethics took a terrifying turn.

Editorial. Oct. 10, 2005.

Some 70 years ago. Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime took power in Germany. So began the most horrific abuses of medical knowledge in the history of the civilized world.

Starting last year, American Medical Association's Institute for Ethics and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., have developed a lecture series that examines Nazi medicine and provides some perspective on what can be learned from this dark hour for humanity and medicine.

The lecture series, presented so far in more than a dozen medical schools and available for CME credit, is an outgrowth of the museum's special exhibition, "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race." The run of the exhibition and the lecture series were recently extended to May 29, 2006. The cost of the lecture series is partially underwritten by the AMA Foundation.

Early in the last century, German physicians had a code of ethics and were even pioneers in setting standards for human research subjects. Germany in the 1930s was a world leader in medical research. Germans were greatly represented among Nobel Prize winners. The electron microscope was invented there.

Germany was in the forefront of epidemiology and population research; the first recorded studies of the effects of cigarette smoking were carried out there. The Nazi party even conducted anti-smoking campaigns. There were mass screenings for cancer and the first promotion of breast self-examination. Public health was emphasized.

Yet from the very start of the Nazi regime, things went terribly wrong. The idea of public health was perverted into a horrifying scenario: Mixed with the German notion of "racial hygiene," the same motivations for fitness and health ultimately led to policies aimed at exterminating the "unfit." An early form of genetic screening took place, and there was emphasis on "hereditary health."