Nazi Medical Practices

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Is teleportation more than just an idea? Can one twin feel the pain of another? Why is freezing bad? When Hitler rose to power in the early 1920’s to late 1930’s, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or more commonly known as the Nazi Party, tried to answer many of these questions - and more. While nearly all of these experiments performed by the Nazi party were cruel and grotesque, the medical world did learn a great deal about medical conditions, medical practices, and the capability of the human body. The German scientists performed three main types of experiments: pharmaceutical testing, war-injury and illness experimentation, and racial experimentation.
For pharmaceutical testing, the Nazis employed many of their concentration camps, such as Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Dachau, and Buchenwald, to test certain drugs on their Jewish prisoners. Different compound were experimented with to see if they could fight contagious diseases like hepatitis, yellow fever, tuberculosis, and typhus. For one particular experiment on malaria, over 1000 Jewish inmates were infected with mosquitos that had malaria or injected with malaria-infected blood. One prisoner, Vieweg, said, “I was used for malaria experiments by Professor Dachfinney at Dachau concentration camp .... On five occasions, I received injections of five cubic centimeters of highly infectious malaria blood.
Quite often, I ran a very high temperature. I got into a very exhausted condition, and after the injection, I received large doses of medical drugs, quinine, ephedrine, and many others”; she continued on to say that even several years later, she would still have malaria attacks and had a difficult time working (Spitz). In other tests, subjects were pois...

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...sent, there must be a valid reason behind the research (not just for curiosity’s sake), and research must have successfully be performed on animals first.

Works Cited
Bachrach, Susan, PhD. "In the Name of Public Health - Nazi Racial Hygiene." The New England Journal of Medicine 351.5 (2004): 417-20. ProQuest. Web. 2 Apr. 2014.
Haverkamp, Beth. "Nazi Medical Experiment Report: Evidence from the Nuremberg." Social Education 59.6 (1995): 367. ProQuest. Web. 2 Apr. 2014.
"Josef Mengele and The Medical Experiments." Josef Mengele and the Medical Experiments. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2014.
"Nazi Medical Experiments: Background & Overview." Background & Overview of Nazi Medical Experiments. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2014.
Spitz, Vivien. Doctors from Hell: the Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans. Boulder, CO: Sentient Publications, LLC, 2005. 02 Apr. 2014.

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