American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on October 19, 2006
American Journal of Epidemiology 2006 164(11):1137; doi:10.1093/aje/kwk060
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BOOK REVIEW |
Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus By Naomi Baumslag
Point Richmond, CA 94801
(e-mail: Winkelstein{at}yahoo.com)
ISBN 0-275-98312-9, Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, Connecticut (Telephone: 800-225-5800, Fax: 603-431-2214, E-mail: eatkin{at}cranburyinternational.com, Website: http://www.greenwood.com/contactus/order_info.asp), 2005, 304 pp., $49.95 (Hardcover)
The extensive, monstrous, and bizarre human experimentation by Nazi physicians before and during World War II was extensively documented by the Nuremburg Trials. In Murderous Medicine, author Naomi Baumslag provides an annotated compendium of documents that chronicle the horrors revealed in the Trials and expands the documentation to reveal widespread application of policies designed to extend the genocide outside the limits of the concentration camps. Emphasis is directed toward the role played by the denial of effective control of typhus fever in the non-German populations of Eastern Europe overrun by the Nazi armies. In a unique chapter, the author describes the efforts by Jewish doctors in the ghettoes and concentration camps to control typhus. In another unique chapter, the author describes the corruption of the Red Cross by the Nazi regime and its subsequent inability to realize its humanitarian mission.
Baumslag provides useful background information that helps provide the context within which the Nazi regime justified its despicable policies. Thus, Murderous Medicine provides a description of how anti-Semitism influenced the organization and delivery of public health and medical care in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe. It also describes some of the processes by which the Nazi doctors made their decisions to conduct human experiments.
The book is profusely illustrated, including a frightening depiction of a human experiment on the front cover. The extensive documentation will be helpful to students interested in expanding their knowledge of what must be the worst example of human depravity on record.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Conflict of interest: none declared.
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