Medicine

Seminar questions:

Were the forced experiments scientific? Why?

What is the wider non-German context of the forced experiments?

How can we historicize informed consent?

What do we gain from victims' perspective on the forced experiments?

How do the prisoner physicians compare to the Jewish functionaries?

Core readings:

Volker Rölcke, “Sulfonamide Experiments on Prisoners in Nazi Concentration Camps: Coherent Scientific Rationality Combined with Complete Disregard of Humanity,” S. Rubenfeld and S. Benedict, eds, Human Subjects Research after the Holocaust, 51-65.

Sari Siegel, “Treating an Auschwitz Prisoner-Physician: The Case of Dr. Maximilian Samuel,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 28,3 (2014): 450-481.

Paul Weindling, “The Origins of Informed Consent: The International Scientific Commission on Medical War Crimes, and the Nuremberg Code,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 75, 1, (Spring 2001): 37-71.

Extended readings:

Lucie Adelsberger, Auschwitz : a doctor's story (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995).

Adina Blady Szwajger, I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children's Hospital and the Jewish Resistance (New York: Pantheon, 1990).

Michael Grodin, ed., Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014).

Anna Hájková, “Medicine in Theresienstadt,” Social History of Medicine 33,1 (February 2020): 79-105.

Michael H. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

“Medical Refugees in Britain and the Wider World,” special issue Social History of Medicine, 22,3 (2009).

Leah Preiss, “Women's Health in the Ghettos of Eastern Europe,” http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/womens-health-in-ghettos-of-eastern-europe

Miriam Offer, “Ethical Dilemmas in the Work of Doctors and Nurses in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Polin 25 (2012): 467-492.

Roger A. Ritvo and Diane M. Plotkin, eds., Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1998).

Charles G. Roland, Courage Under Siege: Starvation, Disease, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Rebecca Schwoch, „The Situation and ethical dilemmas of Krankenbehandler (Sick Treaters), 1938–1945: The example of Hamburg,“ Korot 23 (2015-16): 173-194.

Paul Weindling, Victims and survivors of Nazi human experiments : science and suffering in the Holocaust (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Paul Weindling, From clinic to concentration camp : reassessing Nazi medical and racial research, 1933-1945 (London: Routledge, 2017).

Myron Winick, ed. Hunger Disease: Studies by Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Wiley-Interscience Publications, 1979).