Posted on 10/25/2008 10:53:35 AM PDT by wagglebee
While it is common for analogies to be made between topics such as abortion or euthanasia and the Holocaust, the vast majority of such analogies are baseless, Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at Penn, explained in a talk at the Lewis-Thomas Laboratory on Tuesday.
During his lecture, titled “Bioethics & the Holocaust,” Caplan said that medical experimentation during World War II is often ignored in discussions of bioethics, though the field originated largely in response to Nazi doctors’ atrocities during the war.
Caplan said that many bioethics articles, however, reference the Nuremberg Code, rules governing medical research on humans developed specifically to prevent future instances of the barbaric experiments carried out on concentration camp prisoners.
One reason the bioethics community often ignores the topic of the Holocaust is that it is hard to accept that doctors were so intimately associated with it, with some bioethicists suggesting that only “fringe elements” were involved, Caplan said.
On the contrary, “collaboration between the medical community and the Nazi party was so intimate that if you took away all Nazi doctors, you would have virtually no doctors left,” Caplan said. He gave the example of the German military, which employed many respected scientists to study the effects of extreme pressure and cold on the human body.
To address the disconnect between a profession normally associated with benevolence and the atrocities committed in the name of medicine, some, like psychiatrist Robert Lifton, believe that Nazi doctors developed “split personalities,” Caplan said. One personality allowed them to kill people while on duty, while the other allowed them to go home and play with their children, he explained.
Caplan said that this theory, however, diminishes the doctors’ moral responsibility and ignores ethical implications.
Other doctors did not exhibit this split and did conceive of their work in moral terms, he added, citing Gerhard Rose, the leading doctor on tropical medicine during the war, as an example.
When the German military asked Rose to experiment on concentration camp prisoners to find cures for typhoid and typhus, Caplan explained, Rose refused and was left alone because of his status in Germany.
Rose was ultimately convinced, however, that experimentation on prisoners who would likely die anyway could lead to lifesaving breakthroughs. Because of this reasoning and his initial refusal, Caplan said, Rose was one of the few doctors not sentenced to hanging at the Nuremberg Trials.
During the trials, doctors justified their experimentation in utilitarian terms, arguing that the inhumane treatment of experimental subjects was subordinate to the greater good of society. As a result, the first principle of the Nuremberg Code requires voluntary consent of the subject before experimentation can begin, Caplan said.
With the context of Nazi experimentation in mind, Caplan explained, comparisons portraying bioethical issues like the Terri Schiavo case as analogous to the Holocaust are inaccurate. “[They] fail to understand the Nazi approach to euthanasia,” he said.
The debate in that case concerned whether Schiavo would have wanted her feeding tube removed or be sustained indefinitely in a persistent vegetative state. Nazi physicians, in contrast to modern bioethicists, did not take issues of patient consent and quality of life into account.
If people had suggested that Schiavo’s feeding tube be removed because the cost of keeping her alive was harmful to society, Caplan explained, their utilitarianism could have been related to the Nazis’.
Caplan concluded by suggesting a shift in society’s view of medical experimentation during the Holocaust. The focus should not be on the “kooks and crackpots” like Josef Mengele because those were extreme cases, he said.
“At the end of the day, it’s the Gerhard Roses that speak to us more,” he explained. “A lot of normal people — not so different from you and I — ended up in a camp freezing, torturing and blowing up others.”
They tell themselves this as they continue to push the Nazi agenda.
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It doesn’t matter whether an individual or a group or a nation “decides” a particular person (or type of person) is better off dead.
It’s still wrong to end that person’s life.
And I think using the term “Holocaust” is A-OK.
We've heard almost the exact same rationalization from another group lately - that being the ESC pushers.
The idea should go back even further than the Holocaust. Medical ethics has been on tenuous ground for hundreds of years now.
Inextricably linked with scientific ethics, both face the same basic problem: “What happens when the pursuit of knowledge causes harm?”
Objectivity and rationalization go hand in hand. That is, by harming one or some, others can be helped or saved. This leads invariably to dehumanization, as has long been known.
In 1818, the book, “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” was published. In essence, it was about medical and scientific ethics, and how with their failure, horror and destruction are visited on all.
But in that time, Dr. Frankenstein was ostracized by the medical community for engaging in “unholy” acts.
But even then, it was common for medical students to steal cadavers from graveyards, for their studies. The infamous Burke and Hare murders were just a decade later. So messing around with human remains was not Frankenstein’s ethical lapse. What was found so repulsive was not that he caused harm, but that he tried to restore life to dead tissue.
By trying to be the best imaginable healer, by restoring the dead to life, Frankenstein crossed the ethical boundary. How different would the story have been if he had discovered the way to revitalize just a single dead organ or limb of a living person? Even in those days, his accomplishment would have placed him among the greatest of all physicians, with Galen, with Hippocrates.
But instead of trying to restore life, he tried to create life.
At that time, the medical world and the public understood his ethical failure. Why it was wrong to do so. But today, there are no more boundaries. Scientists and physicians are no longer bound by any ethical code. The Hippocratic Oath just gets in the way of what they want to do.
That is, it doesn’t matter if it harms or kills. Doctors and scientists put themselves above that, feigning objectivity with rationalizations.
If it destroys the world, and all that dwell on it, it does not matter, as long as their perverse curiosity is sated. Today, Dr. Frankenstein is lauded precisely *because* he defies God. And even if the monster is indeed soulless, it does not matter because souls are just imaginary.
They would present him with the Nobel Peace Prize, for allowing tyrants and bloody dictators at least some semblance of immortality.
Excellent points!
From where I stand, the only real solution to this is to have a spiritual foundation or understanding of life and death:
1. God is the author of life, and therefore it is up to Him when a person dies. He creates the life, and it is up to Him to decide when that life is over. Not up to us.*
2. That the soul is really the force that energizes the body - the body is a vehicle or earthly tent, and that “death” means “the soul goes elsewhere”. So the death of the body is not the worst evil in the world; therefore the idea of forcibly keeping the body alive at the expense of others’ is a great evil.
I don’t fear death so much that I would willingly use an organ forcibly removed from a living person! (Or even a dead person...) Or even tons of machinery - of course, I’m nearer 60 than 50 without health insurance - but even if I had insurance, death to me just means leaving here and going somewhere else. There is a natural end to earthly existence just as there is a natural beginning.
*Other than just execution for capital crimes.
My elder Aunt and perfectly healthy was given a shot within 6 weeks she was dead. I found this to be very strange. I’ve always wondered what else was in that shot.
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