Medical Ethics in the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Nazi Doctors, Racial Hygiene, Murder and Genocide
Students, faculty and staff are invited to
“Medical Ethics in the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Nazi Doctors, Racial Hygiene, Murder and Genocide”
Wednesday, Jan. 20
Noon-1:20 p.m.
BUSM Instructional Building, L109 A/B
This talk is being given in memory of Robert Berger, MD, BUSM ’56, Distinguished Alumni Award recipient 1982, former Chief of Cardiac Surgery at BUSM and Director of Cardiovascular Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Dr. Berger was a holocaust survivor who analyzed the science behind the hypothermia experiments that took place in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. His paper, which was published in the May 1990 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, found that the methods used by Nazi researchers were unsound, their approach erratic, the resulting reports “riddled with inconsistencies.” Dr. Berger found evidence of data falsification and suggestions of fabrication.
Michael A. Grodin, MD
Professor of Psychiatry; Family Medicine; Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights, Boston University
Co-director, Joint Project in Jewish Legal Bioethics of the Institute of Jewish Law
Professor, Jewish Studies, Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies
Director, Project on Ethics and the Holocaust
An internationally recognized expert on the Holocaust, Grodin received a special citation from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in recognition of his “profound contributions – through original and creative research – to the cause of Holocaust education and remembrance.” Grodin was the 2000 Julius Silberger Scholar studying Holocaust Survivors and was granted the 2014 Kravitz Humanitarian award of the Psychoanalytic Institute. He has delivered more than 400 invited national and international addresses, written more than 200 scholarly papers, and edited or co-edited seven books including ” Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation” and “Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust.” He has just completed a first draft of a new book “Jewish Spiritual Resistance in the Ghettos During the Holocaust.”
This presentation is sponsored by three student groups: the Maimonides Society, the BUSM Student Historical Society and the Student Internal Medicine Group.