Human Embryology and Teratology, Second Edition

Contrary to common current assumption, modern right-to-die and "Baby Doe" debates are not unprecedented products of new life-saving technology. In 1915, Dr. Harry Haiselden, chief surgeon and president of German-American Hospital in Chicago, was the first Western physician to publicly permit the death of a potentially savable newborn. Dr. Haiselden's decision to take his case to the mass media aroused more opposition than his position on euthanasia did. His cases provoked the first, and prior to the recent "Baby Doe" cases, the most extensively documented public debate over medical refusal to save newborns. Martin Pernick in his book entitled The Black Stork discusses this crucial stage in eugenics and euthanasia. Dr. Haiselden did not initiate the convergence of eugenics and euthanasia, but his campaign focused unprecedented attention on these issues at a critical moment the birth of medicine in the media. He not only vigorously publicized his cases but also wrote and starred in The Black Stork, a polished fictionalized dramatization based loosely on one of his cases. The Black Stork was a melodrama that used shock, fear and revulsion as central persuasive techniques. The film revealed "how eugenicists sought not only to enhance human beauty but also to selectively define it, to promote what they considered healthier aesthetic tastes." In 1917, eugenics and euthanasia were not novelties to moviegoers but no American film came close to matching it in its graphic promotion of eugenic euthanasia. Then as now, the issue of withholding medical treatment became enmeshed in controversy over the role of the mass media in medical disputes. Pemick explains how the movement judged who was unfit to live and provides evidence as to how the scientific movement to fight hereditary disease became associated with race, class, and ethnicity. He asserts that "good" and "bad"are inherently value assessments, reflections of a culture's social structure and ethics. To predict the future course of evolution without knowing the future of environmental change is simply to project one's own values onto nature. In conclusion, Pernick warns that it is dangerously deceptive to equate science with objectivity: "Trying to make any medical science 'value free' can never succeed. Pretending that medicine can be purely objective only repeats the most flawed aspect of Haiselden's eugenics. It permits subjective values to claim the moral authority of scientific truth, while delegitimating the kinds of political and ethical scrutiny that alone can enable a culture to debate and evaluate these value judgments intelligently." Understanding the evolution of the debate sheds light on the way ideas and images emerge. Not only are these issues still pertinent to modern medicine, but also to prevent a recurrence of Nazism, one must understand the evolution of the eugenics debate. The Black Stork provides a discussion of a crucial early stage in the debate in an easy-tofollow manner that makes it interesting and informative reading.