Bioethics and the Holocaust

A Comprehensive Study in How the Holocaust Continues to Shape the Ethics of Health, Medicine and Human Rights

Stacy Gallin, Ira Bedzow

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9783031019869
• eBook ISBN: 9783031019876
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics in Medicine

This open access book offers a framework for understanding how the Holocaust has shaped and continues to shape medical ethics, health policy, and questions related to human rights around the world. The field of bioethics continues to face questions of social and medical controversy that have their roots in the lessons of the Holocaust, such as debates over beginning-of-life and medical genetics, end-of-life matters such as medical aid in dying, the development of ethical codes and regulations to guide human subject research, and human rights abuses in vulnerable populations. As the only example of medically sanctioned genocide in history, and one that used medicine and science to fundamentally undermine human dignity and the moral foundation of society, the Holocaust provides an invaluable framework for exploring current issues in bioethics and society today. This book, therefore, is of great value to all current and future ethicists, medical practitioners and policymakers – as well aslaypeople.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Question of Relevance
• 2. Teaching Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Debunking the Myth that the Nazi Physicians Abandoned Their Ethics
• 3. The Role of Professions in a State: The Effects of the Nazi Experience on Health Care Professionalism
• 4. The Physician’s Role: Patient v. Population
• 5. The Transformation of Physicians from Healers to Killers: The Role of Psychiatry
• 6. The Physician at War
• 7. Medicalization of Social Policies: Defining Health, Defining Illness
• 8. Bioethics and the Krankenmorde: Disability and Diversity
• 9. Race, Eugenics, and the Holocaust
• 10. Physician-Assisted Suicide, Euthanasia, and Bioethics in Nazi and Contemporary Cinema
• 11. Godwin’s Law and the Limits of Bioethics and Holocaust Studies
• 12. From the Nuremberg “Doctors’ Trial” to the “Nuremberg Code”
• 13. The Holocaust as an Inflection Point in the Development of Research Ethics
• 14. The Rights and Responsibilities of the Physician to Uphold Bioethical Values in Society
• 15. Bioethics and the Holocaust in a Multicultural Context
• 16. Medicine, the Holocaust, and Human Dignity: Lessons from Human Rights
• 17. The Goals of Medicine in a Post-Holocaust Society
• Back Matter