Medicine in the Nazi Regime: Ethical Lessons Learned

Host: Maurice Pickard, MD Guest: Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH One of the most horrific disasters in modern history, the Holocaust, is being illuminated through a lens that is of particular interest to medical professionals, through a traveling exhibit called Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. Nazism's roots in biology and genetics interlinked medical professionals with its advocacy of a eugenic program that ultimately led to the murder of European Jews in the Holocaust. What ethical lessons can we learn from examining physician involvement with the Nazi regime and what they called "racial hygiene for the greater good"? Dr. Matthew Wynia, director of the Institute for Ethics at the American Medical Association, stresses the importance for all medical professionals of understanding the role physicians played in implementing Nazi racial eugenics, and frames the ethical issues in the historical context of the early 20th century. How did German physicians succumb to the pseudo-science that formed the basis of Nazi racial eugenics, and what lessons can we learn from this? How did one of the worldwide leaders in the medical community fall from the forefront of medicine to orchestrate some of the worst crimes the world has ever seen? Hosted by Dr. Maurice Pickard.