Throughout medicine, there have been heroes, villains, and people in between. Which category they are put in depends on the beholder. However, whether the person in question is seen as a good or bad person, they still could have contributed to medicine’s history. This is the case with Karl Brandt, a physician who worked under Hitler during World War II. While he may have practiced medicine in an unconventional way, he was a major figure who made an impact. Brandt, a German physician, befriended Hitler through Anni Rehborn, Brandt’s future wife. He rose in rank and gained Hitler’s trust by taking care of SA officers who had been in a car accident. Brandt soon became a member of the SA and then the SS. He was later appointed Hitler’s physician and would travel along in case of emergencies. Eventually, his close relationship with Hitler gave him great power in the medical field. Brandt’s first duties started out by performing abortions on women who were deemed as unfit to reproduce or if their fetus was seen as defective. The reasoning for this was to make a more perfect union, but many of the Nazis found this plan to be too slow. To quicken the purification process, they created the T-4 Euthanasia Program. This program was for mass killing of innocent people who were distinguished as incurable or defective. On September 1, 1939, Brandt was named co-head of the program along side Philipp Bouhler. Here is where Brandt became a part of medical history. The T-4 Euthanasia Program was set in motion with the pretense that it was merciful killing. The physicians were seen as men who were helping the poor victims of dieases die peacefully. However, many of those who were killed were mentally ill and therefore they were not going to die ... ... middle of paper ... ... perform horrific tests on innocent victims under the belief that it was for the good of Germany. Though the Nazi doctors tortured and killed so many guiltless people, they did eventually pay for their crimes. The Doctors’ Trial found sixteen of the twenty-three physicians and workers guilty and seven were sentenced to death. Brandt was one of these doctors who was executed, he was hanged on July 2, 1948, in Landsberg Prison, alongside three fellow physicians and three assistants. Karl Brandt was a noteworthy physician who turned ruthless in the company of Hitler and the Nazis. He engaged in heinous crimes and allowed many other appalling experiments to be executed. Though some of the tests done by Brandt and his men led to medical discoveries that are used in the field today, their work will always be remembered as an atrocity, and many consider them to be villains.
Dworkin, Gerald. " The Nature of Medicine." Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide: For and Against. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
If you have been in a History class you have probably heard of an event that happened after World War Two called the Nuremberg Trials. These trials were conducted by the United States. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was appointed to lead the trials (Berenbaum). During these trials they charged with Crimes against the Peace, War crimes and Crimes against Humanity (Berenbaum). Many major Nazi leaders committed suicide before officials could hang them or before even being caught. The famous Doctor Goebbels killed his children then him and his wife committed suicide (Berenbaum). Only twelve out of the twenty-two who stood trial were hanged, twelve, while the rest just got prison time. Besides major Nazi officials, Physicians were put on trial, the people who were part of the mobile killing squads, Concentration camp officials, Judges and Executives who sold concentration camps Zyklon B. You can expect that they had many excuses, but m...
On the first of September, 1939 World War II began. Hitler is in power of Nazi Germany and is wanting to cleanse the German people of racially unsound elements. He enacts a program that will aim to eliminate the so called “lives unworthy of life” called the T4 program (History Place). Over the next six years throughout Germany, many people are experimenting with and euthanized to help Nazi Germany reach a “pure” state. Was this program that was enacted ethical and what has happened since then to stop something like this from happening again? What kind of medical advances and data did we achieve from it and is it ethical today to use what they learned in today’s medical trials?
Some of the people had a positive viewpoint. ONe such person was Fritz Lawz, who was a professor of race hygiene at the university of Munich (“Introduction to Nazi Euthanasia”). There were also authors that expresssed their strong agreement to the program. One such author was Karl Bindings who partnered with Adolf Hoche to write “The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life”(“Introduction to Nazi Euthanasia”). Throught the propaganda some families became strong supporters of the program. One such family was the family of the blind Gerhard Herbert Kretschmar, who was born with one leg and part of one arm missing. Gerhard was called an idiot by his father and his family requested his killing to Hitler. Hitler approved and Gerhard became known as the Knauer Child and was a catalyst of euthanasia (“Introduction to Nazi Euthanasia”). Some people had a negative viewpoint of the program, like Kurt Gerstein. Kurt was part of the Nazi party, but left after his sister-in-law as killed through the T-4 Program. He used his sorrow to preach at churches of the horrible doings of the Nazi’s. He had no success (Hogan #36). Others, like Samuel Beckett made fun of Hitler’s standards saying that “An Aryan must be blonde like Hitler, think like Gorig, handsome like the Goebbels, virile, like Rӧhn- and named Rosenberg.” With all these viewpoints many were left confused and no actions were being taken to stop the program. It continued
January 30th, 1933 was the day thousands of lives were affected greatly. Adolf Hitler began as the Chancellor of Germany. Hitler and his newly founded army, were always viewed as the true killers of the innocent Jews. Many did not notice the people who actually did a great deal of the killing, the doctors that is. There were a number of doctors from the Holocaust that are known for horrific killing but one stands out above the rest. Dr. Josef Mengele is the one that most people know about. He is the one that is known for his antics in the killing of Jews. He can’t be compared to the others because what he did was like no other.
In 1930, young, teenage Mengele completed high school and left his home to study medicine at Munich University in Germany. Adolf Hitler was stirring up the Bavarian people at this time with his “anti-Jewish” ideas. He attracted large crowds, who gather...
Assisted- physician suicide also goes by many names such as euthanasia. 'Euthanasia' rings an enormous bell as the same structure used during the holocaust in the 1940s. The difference between now and then is the innocent lives lost because of their inc...
“Michael Manning, MD, in his 1998 book Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide: Killing or Caring?, traced the history of the word euthanasia: ‘The term euthanasia.originally meant only 'good death,'but in modern society it has come to mean a death free of any anxiety and pain, often brought about through the use of medication.” It seems there has always been some confusion and questions from our society about the legal and moral questions regarding the new science of euthanasia. “Most recently, it has come to mean'mercy killing' — deliberately putting an end to someone’s life in order to spare the individual’s suffering.’” I would like to emphasize the words “to spare the individual’s suffering”.
... said. He had this obsession about keeping the Germans pure and he also he explained that Germany is. After he got out of jail he took advantage of the status to rise and eventually he was named Chancellor of Germany.
The right to assisted suicide is a significant topic that concerns people all over the United States. The debates go back and forth about whether a dying patient has the right to die with the assistance of a physician. Some are against it because of religious and moral reasons. Others are for it because of their compassion and respect for the dying. Physicians are also divided on the issue. They differ where they place the line that separates relief from dying--and killing. For many the main concern with assisted suicide lies with the competence of the terminally ill. Many terminally ill patients who are in the final stages of their lives have requested doctors to aid them in exercising active euthanasia. It is sad to realize that these people are in great agony and that to them the only hope of bringing that agony to a halt is through assisted suicide.When people see the word euthanasia, they see the meaning of the word in two different lights. Euthanasia for some carries a negative connotation; it is the same as murder. For others, however, euthanasia is the act of putting someone to death painlessly, or allowing a person suffering from an incurable and painful disease or condition to die by withholding extreme medical measures. But after studying both sides of the issue, a compassionate individual must conclude that competent terminal patients should be given the right to assisted suicide in order to end their suffering, reduce the damaging financial effects of hospital care on their families, and preserve the individual right of people to determine their own fate.
Euthanasia is a serious political, moral and ethics issues in society. People either strictly forbid or firmly favor euthanasia. Terminally ill patients have a fatal disease from which they will never recover, many will never sleep in their own bed again. Many beg health professionals to “pull the plug” or smother them with a pillow so that they do not have to bear the pain of their disease so that they will die faster. Thomas D. Sullivan and James Rachels have very different views on the permissibility of active and passive euthanasia. Sullivan believes that it is impermissible for the doctor, or anyone else to terminate the life of a patient but, that it is permissible in some cases to cease the employment of “extraordinary means” of preserving
The ethical debate regarding euthanasia dates back to ancient Greece and Rome. It was the Hippocratic School (c. 400B.C.) that eliminated the practice of euthanasia and assisted suicide from medical practice. Euthanasia in itself raises many ethical dilemmas – such as, is it ethical for a doctor to assist a terminally ill patient in ending his life? Under what circumstances, if any, is euthanasia considered ethically appropriate for a doctor? More so, euthanasia raises the argument of the different ideas that people have about the value of the human experience.
More than likely, a good majority of people have heard about euthanasia at least once in their lifetime. For those out there who have been living under a rock their entire lives, euthanasia “is generally understood to mean the bringing about of a good death – ‘mercy killing’, where one person, ‘A’, ends the life of another person, ‘B’, for the sake of ‘B’.” (Kuhse 294). There are people who believe this is a completely logical scenario that should be allowed, and there are others that oppose this view. For the purpose of this essay, I will be defending those who are suffering from euthanasia.
Robert Matz; Daniel P. Sudmasy; Edward D. Pallegrino. "Euthanasia: Morals and Ethics." Archives of Internal Medicine 1999: p1815 Aug. 9, 1999 .
When Hitler ordered widespread mercy killings in October of 1939, he did not know the true meaning of ‘mercy k...