Lessons learned

Dr. William Seidelman

This year's Dr. T.J. Murray Visiting Scholar in Medical Humanities served up a cautionary tale from Germany's Nazi past, to underscore the importance of academic vigilance in preserving medical ethics.

Dr. William Seidelman, an expert on the medical history of the Third Reich and Emeritus Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, recounted some of the key German medical figures with celebrated international reputations who enthusiastically engaged in some of the most infamous activity in modern medicine. Only recently, he said, has the medical profession taken tentative steps to consider its role in this history.

Dr. Seidelman pointed out that during the Third Reich, nearly half of Germany's doctors joined the Nazi party. Of all occupational groups, physicians contributed the greatest proportion of party members.

Among the villains Dr. Seidelman cited was Dr. Freiherr Otmar von Verschuer the eminent director of the genetics and eugenics program at the renowned Kaiser Wilhelm Institute who specialized in the study of twins. Some of his work was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and he was founding director of the largest institute of genetics and race hygiene of the day at the University of Frankfurt. As mentor, teacher and friend of  the notorious Dr. Joseph Mengele, Dr. Verschuer recommended him for the physician's post at Auschwitz. Dr. Veschuer pursued his own research with human specimens supplied from Dr. Mengele's death camp experiments. After the war Dr. Verschuer became professor and head of genetics at the University of Munster and his work was cited for many years in the genetics literature.
 
Also on the list was Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, father of  thoracic surgery and professor of surgery at the prestigious Humboldt University and the Berlin CharitŽ Hospital. In his capacity as head of the German Research Council, Sauerbruch received progress reports from Dr. Verschuer and authorized payment for his Auschwitz work.

Dr. Seidelman later advised that "Sauerbruch authorized payment for the entire research project which included the collection of specimens from murdered subjects. As far as we know, the corpses themselves were not delivered to his research laboratory, only specimens that had been removed in Auschwitz."

Then there was Dr. Julius Hallervorden, a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Brain Research at Berlin-Buch who found in Hitler's euthanasia program an opportunity to collect brain specimens from selected inmates of mental institutions. In 1990 the collection was buried in the Forest Cemetery in Munich. Buried with them were brain specimens from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, chiefly derived from children murdered by the Nazis.

The University of TŸbingen, discovered in the late 1980s that some of its anatomical specimens had come from Nazi victims too. During the war the Institute received 429 cadavers from the Nazi terror, some of them slave laborers. The university struck an independent commission of inquiry and all specimens of uncertain origin were buried.

Other collections remain suspect including that of  Dr. Hermann Stieve of the CharitŽ Hospital, in what was formerly known as East Berlin. Dr. Stieve furthered his work on the menstrual cycle using women imprisoned and slated for death by the Gestapo.

"The University of  Jena has conducted an inquiry into its collection and there are currently investigations taking place at the CharitŽ," Dr. Seidelman later indicated.

The subject of one of the most exquisite illustrations in anatomy, the product of Dr. Eduard Pernkopf 's internationally esteemed atlas, was revealed in the late 1990s to have been a possible victim of the Nazi terror.

 "We don't know where this person came from - not necessarily a concentration camp. Most likely he was a local victim of the Vienna Gestapo," Dr. Seidelman added.

An investigation by the University of Vienna, where Dr. Pernkopf worked, discovered that between 1938 and 1945 the anatomy department received at least 1, 377 bodies from Gestapo executions. The signatures of the illustrators in the original edition incorporated Nazi iconography. Dr. Seidelman noted a later copy of the famous atlas is in Dalhousie's W.K. Kellogg Health Sciences Library.