Reflections on “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race”
By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. This piece, written for the October 2010, edition of National Right to Life News, is part of our year-long “roe at 40” series in which we are reprinting stories from NRL News going all the way back to 1973. The exhibit discussed below was exceptionally helpful to understanding the origins of the Nazi Holocaust.
Over
the years many of our readers have written and emailed to tell me how
much they enjoy Wesley Smith’s blog entries, which he so generously
allows me to reprint. It’s not just the quality of his work that is so
worth reading, it is Wesley’s keen insight into the mind of
“bioethicists.”
I try to avoid analogizing what many contemporary American bioethicists argue to the awful, monstrous rationalizations that the Medical Establishment provided for the Nazis—both in the early decades of the 20th century and when Adolph Hitler assumed power. Sometimes, however, it’s hard not to draw parallels.
I mention that because I read yesterday about the traveling exhibit “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race” which is now at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Tooling around the web, I learned that version draws its inspiration from “the acclaimed exhibition of the same name that originally opened at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in April 2004.”
Reading a story in the Los Angeles Times about the exhibit reinforced so many lessons, so many warnings from Wesley and the late Rev. Richard John Neuhaus. The Times’ Eryn Brown wrote
She then shrewdly observes,
It is obviously not true of all doctors or bioethicists, but whenever
any of them start provided justifications to exclude members of the
human family from the ring of legal protection, they must be called on
it and stopped cold in their tracks.
Source: NRLC News
Editor’s note. This piece, written for the October 2010, edition of National Right to Life News, is part of our year-long “roe at 40” series in which we are reprinting stories from NRL News going all the way back to 1973. The exhibit discussed below was exceptionally helpful to understanding the origins of the Nazi Holocaust.
Over
the years many of our readers have written and emailed to tell me how
much they enjoy Wesley Smith’s blog entries, which he so generously
allows me to reprint. It’s not just the quality of his work that is so
worth reading, it is Wesley’s keen insight into the mind of
“bioethicists.”I try to avoid analogizing what many contemporary American bioethicists argue to the awful, monstrous rationalizations that the Medical Establishment provided for the Nazis—both in the early decades of the 20th century and when Adolph Hitler assumed power. Sometimes, however, it’s hard not to draw parallels.
I mention that because I read yesterday about the traveling exhibit “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race” which is now at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Tooling around the web, I learned that version draws its inspiration from “the acclaimed exhibition of the same name that originally opened at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in April 2004.”
Reading a story in the Los Angeles Times about the exhibit reinforced so many lessons, so many warnings from Wesley and the late Rev. Richard John Neuhaus. The Times’ Eryn Brown wrote
“But ‘Deadly Medicine’ also aims to
show that doctors’ and scientists’ role in the Holocaust wasn’t limited
to measuring noses or conducting gruesome experiments in concentration
camps. The exhibit argues that by advancing the theory of eugenics–and
then providing cover for the Nazi regime when it used that theory to
buttress its racist and genocidal policies– German scientists helped lay
the foundation upon which the Holocaust was built.”
Brown correctly picks up on a crucial argument made by the exhibit.
“But most of the exhibit’s artifacts illustrate the dark side of Nazi
eugenics, in which scientists called for mass sterilization–and
eventually ‘euthanasia’–for people with a variety of sometimes
haphazardly defined physical and mental illnesses.”She then shrewdly observes,
“It wasn’t a terribly long leap, the
exhibit suggests, from the (comparatively limited, though still
horrifying) task of sterilizing or killing the ill to coordinating the
mass murder of ethnic groups that the Nazis–and their scientists –deemed
defective, including Jews. ‘The euthanasia program provided a model for
the much larger project that was to come,’ [curator Susan] Bachrach [of
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum] said.”
Source: NRLC News
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