"The Moral Status of Nazi Medicine" was the inaugural lecture of the Holocaust in Contemporary Bioethics Program, held during Holocaust Awareness Week on May 2, 2008 at the University of Colorado. The program was hosted by the University's Center for Bioethics and Humanities. The speaker, Donald W. Seldin, MD, served as expert witness at the Dachau Trials, where he was posted as Chief of Medical Services to the US Army in 1946-48. Dr. Seldin was also Commissioner of the National Commission for Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical Research & Behavioral Research, from 1974-79.
Micah member Mike Aubry was kind enough to attend and share his notes on Dr Seldin's presentation. I found myself valuing Mike's reflections for their power to provide us with a Yom Hashoa meditation. Mike's rich reflections are highlighted in blue. Although it's hot July, you might find yourself musing over his ideas, which I hope I've interpreted accurately below. Your response is welcome.
"To inspire all health care professionals to practice with compassion, respect, and justice and to always uphold their ultimate duty to protect the patient," is the official mission statement of the Center for Bioethics & Humanities. Dr. Seldin begins with a recounting of a physician's trial for performing liver biopsies on prisoners of the Nazis. Forty prisoners died as a result of procedures best described as torture, with no medical benefit to the victims, and, he added, no research benefit. Had there been a "research benefit," the issue of ethics remains, of course, because biomedical ethics insists on the informed consent of volunteers. Values in medical ethics include: that volunteers have autonomy, and that the hoped-for benefits of research exceed the risk of harm to volunteers. These values imply an unalterable highest valuing of every individual, with no bending to cultural relativism, political correctness or "anarchic subjectivism" in which determination of the "good" lies solely in the eye of the beholder--or the ones with the power. Here's a great question for discussion--try this at the dinner table Friday night--is: Are there universal values? If such "research" had provided any good outcome for medicine, would this displace the value we believe Torah instructs us to place on each human life?
Mike invites us to remember our own primitive psychological and social roots:
"50,000 years ago our ancestors shadowed their hands with pigment sprayed onto a cave wall; they announced that a being endowed with self-awareness and a sense of wonder had arrived. The rules changed. Prior to that point one might argue that the only imperative was simply to make it to tomorrow, pass on some genetic information, and destroy anything interfering with the first two goals. After that an ABSOLUTE law kicks in. Now, suddenly, there is something larger than oneself. Maybe there is beauty in this larger world...the struggle with that law is what I, as a Jew and human, believe is an essential kernel to the meaning of life."
Beautifully put. Then Mike explores the moral imperative for we Americans to do some soul-searching about own own violations of our values. He notes that while 1940s Germany was a sophisticated culture that succumbed to a mad politician's seduction into "we're #1" thinking, sixty-plus years later our American political climate and culture are similarly blinded to violations of our self-proclaimed status as morally superior regarding human rights. We neither apply our own values to the treatment of political prisoners (Guantanamo Bay) nor do we do enough soul-searching about us-vs-them-ism (Israel and the Palestinians).
"It may be convenient to apply different standards to the stranger but it undermines our ability to do good and be good in this interconnected world....Adonai is One."
Dr. Seldin concluded his remarks with four lessons to be gained form the Holocaust, for all the world to study with humility:
1. " Support a free society. If you are whispering secrets to your spouse in the dead of night because the streets are filled with spies (electronic or human) that are working for the "purity" of society then the rot has already become gangrenous."
2. "Be suspicious of secret societies. What is so secret that our government, 'for the people and by the people,' cannot share?"
3. "Be suspicious of laws that prohibit ethical dissent. Is any law or war so sacred that it must be protected form the harsh light of dissent?"
"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings."
-Heinrich Heine (German poet and writer, 1797-1856)
4. " Be wary of brutality in any form." "We love to voyeuristically watch our cinematic action heroes beat the information out of the bad guys...we can water-board this guy until he tells the truth. Or, maybe he will tell us what we don't want to hear...if he tells us that we have become more corrupt than the enemy, we'll send him off to a secret prison. that'll teach him. Except, it is we who need to be taught.
"The imperative of the moment can activate that part of the brain that existed...before our...heritage transformed us into something human. Sixty-some years ago a few of us called torture "medicine" and we should never forget the lessons of that transposition or the Holocaust."
Mike reminds us of the humility needed to heal this broken world. We must look at ourselves as still able to sink to the lowest, most vile actions. In 2008 we humans are not immune to what our fellows perpetrated in the 1940s. Become human, and humane, is an ongoing endeavor. Our reptilian brain is always with us. But then, and more profoundly, so is God. We must listen to that still, small voice, of dissent, of compassion, of higher calling into life. Thanks, Mike, for taking the time to share your reflections with us.
