Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis

Rating:
Summary: Racial Hygiene
Review: Directing his book to the academic world, Proctor presented the medical and biomedical communities as the propelling forces behind Hitler's holocaust. After explaining the historical origins and context of Nazism, Proctor provided an illuminating examination of the obscure, complex role of Nazi medical science and "applied biology" in the development of Nazi public health policy and the implementation of Nazi atrocities. Proctor disclosed how the medical profession, motivated by politics and a lust for power and prestige, used science to produce knowledge to be used to the detriment and even the destruction of others. Proctor's comprehensive assessment also revealed international influences (normally erased from American history books!) and scientific "evidence" which contributed to the scientific and political views that helped shape Nazi medical culture, and political and racial policies of the Third Reich. Proctor detailed Nazi programs involving racial purification, sterilization, women's rights, euthanasia, and scientific experimentation as examples of how politics shaped the practice of science. Proctor also detailed the resistance to the onslaught of Nazism by the Association of Socialist Physicians, the most organized form of medical opposition and how German medicine might have evolved had history taken a different path. Proctor concluded with an epilogue on postwar legacies and detailed the events that occurred to those involved in the implementation of the Nazi public policies including the transition of prewar "racial hygiene" into postwar "human genetics". ("amedard" aka "djondjon")

Rating:
Summary: Racial Hygiene
Review: Directing his book to the academic world, Proctor presented the medical and biomedical communities as the propelling forces behind Hitler's holocaust. After explaining the historical origins and context of Nazism, Proctor provided an illuminating examination of the obscure, complex role of Nazi medical science and "applied biology" in the development of Nazi public health policy and the implementation of Nazi atrocities. Proctor disclosed how the medical profession, motivated by politics and a lust for power and prestige, used science to produce knowledge to be used to the detriment and even the destruction of others. Proctor's comprehensive assessment also revealed international influences (normally erased from American history books!) and scientific "evidence" which contributed to the scientific and political views that helped shape Nazi medical culture, and political and racial policies of the Third Reich. Proctor detailed Nazi programs involving racial purification, sterilization, women's rights, euthanasia, and scientific experimentation as examples of how politics shaped the practice of science. Proctor also detailed the resistance to the onslaught of Nazism by the Association of Socialist Physicians, the most organized form of medical opposition and how German medicine might have evolved had history taken a different path. Proctor concluded with an epilogue on postwar legacies and detailed the events that occurred to those involved in the implementation of the Nazi public policies including the transition of prewar "racial hygiene" into postwar "human genetics". ("amedard" aka "djondjon")

Rating:
Summary: A great indepth look at the roots of Racial Hygiene
Review: I did this book for a college book review. Though hard to get into at first, the book is very informative and interesting, *if* you are interested in the whole Nazi medicine story.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book Eyeopening!
Review: I read this book after Peter Sichrovsky's 'Schuldig Geboren' (Born Guilty) about the offspring of noted Nazis. The connection? A whole lot of the latter were descended from Nazi doctors. Many of them were themselves in or studying medicine, and the claim was made repeatedly of the huge following of the whole medical profession for Naziism. And why not?, the Nazi doctrine itself can be rendered by the phrase 'racial hygiene'! Imagine having a whole political movement willing to empower physicians, give them their heart's delight for social prestige and influence (in funded public health measures) and eliminate a huge fraction of their competitors/rivals (Jewish doctors) to boot? But did you know that the inspiration for a lot of Hitler's measures (from anti-alcohol measures to restricted immigration, to sterilization of 'undesirables') came from the USA? Frightening how close our two systems could be.