Short abstract
An exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, S W Washington, DC, 20024-2126, USA, until 16 October 2005 www.ushmm.org/deadlymedicine/
Rating: ★★
Between 1939 and 1945 more than 200 000 “incurable” patients in Germany were murdered under strict medical supervision. Among these were at least 5000 children—disabled boys and girls who had been singled out for euthanasia in state hospitals by a panel of expert physicians. How did scientists and doctors come to join ideologues and politicians in such a heinous crime? This major exhibition tells the story.
The show begins with something right out of Gunther von Hagens' “Körperwelten” or “Body Worlds” (see BMJ 2001;323: 698)—a full size anatomical model of a transparent man, his arms outstretched and head tilted back in rapture. A central element in Nazi public health campaigns, the Glass Man of Dresden was once charged with teaching “the miracle that we ourselves are.” Today he's not so optimistic.
Early inspiration for the German eugenics movement came from abroad. By the early 1930s, more than half of the states in the USA had voluntary sterilisation laws, under which more than 16 000 operations had been performed. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld the laws in the Supreme Court, commenting that in some cases “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Figure 1.
The Glass Man of Dresden
Eugenicists in Germany cited these programmes in defence of the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring in 1933. Within a decade half a million Germans had been forcibly sterilised for conditions ranging from alcoholism to schizophrenia.
Six years later, the self-appointed “Arzt des deutschen Volkes” (doctor of the German people)—Adolf Hitler—ordered his deputies to commence Operation T-4, a plan to execute all those deemed genetically unfit and a drain on national resources. The original note authorising T-4 is on display in “Deadly Medicine” amid a chilling collection of photographs, film clips, and medical paraphernalia.
We see a white lab coat belonging to a murderous German doctor, a pair of oven mitts used when operating an incinerator, and a wide array of calipers for racial anthropometry. A section on the science of eugenics includes several eye classification charts—metal trays lined evenly with artificial eyeballs peering out from a bed of plaster. Skin colour charts that look like autumnal watercolour palettes give a similar sense of how racial science was practised in the lab.
Less useful are the medical implements of no particular historical provenance that fill out the display cases. These include an old fashioned microscope, a set of hospital curtains, and a tile floor. Clamps, scalpels, and even a pair of ordinary-seeming scissors are displayed as if their very antiseptic gleam were evidence of malicious intent.
Figure 2.
Dr Eugen Fischer, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity from 1927 to 1942, who ran courses for German SS doctors
Props were used when original objects were not available, says the show's curator, Dr Susan Bachrach. “It's the next best thing... people can connect the object to their own lives and it provokes an emotional response.” Dr Bachrach worked with a theatrical designer, David Layman, to create a hospital atmosphere. “Sometimes it feels a bit manipulative,” concedes Dr Bachrach, “but it drives home the fact that this did occur within a medical environment.”
It also drives home the fact that “Deadly Medicine” hesitates to make distinctions between science and ideology. Some of the eugenic research described in the exhibition has since been accepted in mainstream medicine, like the work on a genetic basis for addiction and Huntington's chorea. But the show places these studies alongside spurious research on racial classification. The casual viewer may have difficulty separating out the evils and excesses of Nazi medicine from mainstream research and mundane clinical practice.
Dr Bachrach didn't want to dismiss the whole of German eugenics as “pseudoscientific and the activities of quacks, as there has been a popular tendency to do.” But as you walk among the collection of terrifying Nazi artefacts flanked by theatrical stage props, the nuance may be hard to detect.
Items reviewed are rated on a 4 star scale (4=excellent)