Lectures on Inhumanity: Teaching Medical Ethics in German Medical Schools Under Nazism.
نویسندگان
چکیده
Nazi medicine and its atrocities have been explored in depth over the past few decades, but scholars have started to examine medical ethics under Nazism only in recent years. Given the medical crimes and immoral conduct of physicians during the Third Reich, it is often assumed that Nazi medical authorities spurned ethics. However, in 1939, Germany introduced mandatory lectures on ethics as part of the medical curriculum. Course catalogs and archival sources show that lectures on ethics were an integral part of the medical curriculum in Germany between 1939 and 1945. Nazi officials established lecturer positions for the new subject area, named Medical Law and Professional Studies, at every medical school. The appointed lecturers were mostly early members of the Nazi Party and imparted Nazi political and moral values in their teaching. These values included the unequal worth of human beings, the moral imperative of preserving a pure Aryan people, the authoritarian role of the physician, the individual's obligation to stay healthy, and the priority of public health over individual-patient care. This article shows that there existed not only a Nazi version of medical ethics but also a systematic teaching of such ethics to students in Nazi Germany. The findings illustrate that, from a historical point of view, the notion of "eternal values" that are inherent to the medical profession is questionable. Rather, the prevailing medical ethos can be strongly determined by politics and the zeitgeist and therefore has to be repeatedly negotiated.
منابع مشابه
Evaluation of large-group lectures in medicine – development of the SETMED-L (Student Evaluation of Teaching in MEDical Lectures) questionnaire
BACKGROUND The seven categories of the Stanford Faculty Development Program (SFDP) represent a framework for planning and assessing medical teaching. Nevertheless, so far there is no specific evaluation tool for large-group lectures that is based on these categories. This paper reports the development and psychometric validation of a short German evaluation tool for large-group lectures in medi...
متن کاملProximity morality in medical school – medical students forming physician morality "on the job": Grounded theory analysis of a student survey
BACKGROUND The value of ethics education have been questioned. Therefore we did a student survey on attitudes about the teaching of ethics in Swedish medical schools. METHODS Questionnaire survey on attitudes to ethics education with 409 Swedish medical students participating. We analyzed > 8000 words of open-ended responses and multiple-choice questions using classic grounded theory procedur...
متن کاملImproving awareness of ethical issues.
Medical ethics embraces two broad issues. 1 First, the level of professional competence to deliver the best possible medical care. Second, ethical and moral concerns that are raised in the course of the investigation and management of medical disorders. Recent decades have seen an increase in the time given to instruction in medical ethics in the standard medical curriculum. In 1950 the General...
متن کاملTeaching child and adolescent psychiatry to undergraduate medical students - A survey in German-speaking countries
OBJECTIVE To conduct a survey about teaching child and adolescent psychiatry to undergraduate medical students in German-speaking countries. METHODS A questionnaire was sent to the 33 academic departments of child and adolescent psychiatry in Germany, Austria, and the German-speaking part of Switzerland. RESULTS All departments responded. For teaching knowledge, the methods most commonly re...
متن کاملSurvey of undergraduate teaching in genitourinary medicine in Britain.
OBJECTIVE To determine whether the time allocated for undergraduate teaching of genitourinary medicine has changed since 1984 and to determine the impact of HIV/AIDS on the teaching of the specialty. METHODS A self completion questionnaire was sent to the consultant in charge of each department of genitourinary medicine attached to a UK medical school. RESULTS Replies were received from all...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید
ثبت ناماگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید
ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Annals of internal medicine
دوره 166 8 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2017