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Nazi medical experiments
Advances in medicine during ww2
Advances in medicine during ww2
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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
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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.
"Medical Experiments ." 10 June 2013. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . 18 March 2014 .
Between 1939 and 1945, more than seventy medical research projects and medical experiments were conducted at Auschwitz and Dachau. (Auschwitz Medical Experimentation). Over two hundred doctors participated in such research projects and experiments, sentencing between 70,000 and 100,000 people, held against their will, to death through experimentation. These were mostly Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals and other minorities. They were thought to be inferior to the human race. Such practices became widely accepted and embraced by the Germans, due to the Nazis propaganda. The experiments conducted were diverse, but could be categorized in three classes.
Many medical experiments went on during the holocaust, mostly in concentration camps. These subjects included Jews, Gypsies, twins, and political prisoners. The experiments included many of these people never survived many were killed for further examination. The Jewish people got the full wrath of the injections, inhumane surgeries, and other experimentations. Twins were also desirable in these experiments to show a controlled group. Gypsies and political prisoners were experimented with, because they were there for the Germans disposal. Thousands of people died in these horrible experiments. These experiments were performed to show how the Jewish race was inferior to the Aryan race.
As the human species develops, medicine follows suit. Researchers look down medicinal avenues which promise a better life-- a longer life. However, red and blue paint cannot engender purple paint without proper mixing. Thus, health sciences cannot expand without thorough experimentation. The Nazis exemplified this concept of “thorough experimentation” with their cruel and inhumane medical experiments. The trials varied in nature and reason. Some of the “experiments had legitimate scientific purposes, though the methods that were used violated the canons of medical ethics. Others were racial in nature, designed to advance Nazi racial theories. [However,] Most were simply bad science.” (jewishvirtuallibrary.org). The medical experiments performed by the Nazis were vast and highly divergent, but they can generally be divided into three categories: racial experimentation, war-injury experimentation, and pharmaceutical testing.
During the Holocaust, the Nazis carried out many unethical medical experiments on patients without regard for their survival. Prisoners were forced to be subjects in various studies against their will. The Nazis’ victims went through indescribable pain as they were forced through high-altitude, freezing, tuberculosis, sea water, sulfanilamide, poison, and transplant experiments. Through these tragic Holocaust experiments, scientists and doctors discovered treatments used today for high-altitude sickness, hypothermia, contagious diseases, dehydration, poisoning, and war wounds.
RESPONSE: There are alternatives methods to replace animal testing and the technology for it will advance and continues to do so. The glass vasculature model, used to study fluid dynamics in cardiovascular studies, is a compact step in the right direction. Hopefully, a time will come when scientists do not have to use animals for scientific purposes. Other methods for curing Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, sickle cell disease, stroke, spinal cord damage and etc will develop. (74 words)
"Nazi Medical Experimentation: The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments." The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.
Epstein shows the process that the majority of Jews were being put through, such as the medical examinations, medical experimentations, gas chambers and crematoriums. Medical examinations were used to determine if the Jews were healthy enough to work. Dr. Mengele used the Jews as “lab rats” and performed many experiments such as a myriad of drug testing and different surgeries. The gas chamber was a room where Jews were poisoned to death with a preparation of prussic acid, called Cyclo...
In this argumentative essay written by Dr. Ron Kline a pediatrician who wrote his essay titled “A Scientist: I am the enemy”. The article gives an insight on how animal research has helped many people and shine a light on the benefits of animal research. Ron Kline is the director of bone marrow transplants at the University of Louisville. Furthermore, the essay explains his thoughts and his own reasons for his love of medical research. In addition, the essay include the opposing side of the argument which has a lot feedback from activist groups that think that animal research is horrible.
In 1945 200,000 people were murdered. All of them were children and disabled. The kids that needed help were killed in the Euthanasia Program to save resources. The Euthanasia program was a program designed for the killing of the disabled and started with infants and children. The Euthanasia program was designed by a few people and these people decided how the disabled were selected and killed through the program. They started the program for a specific reason, to make their race superior and pure, this made the life of the discriminated very difficult, with a lot of restrictions on their rights. With all this going many people had different viewpoints on whether the program was right or not and could not find a way to
1. Gutman, Yisrael. “Nazi Doctors.” Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press: 1994. 301-316
"Science as Salvation: Weimar Eugenics, 1919–1933." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 10 June 2013. Web. 27 May 2014.
"Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine." Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.
The Nazis performed some of the most horrific experiments of anyone. The Auschwitz under the direction of Dr. Eduard wirths had inmates selected to certain experiments which were designed to help the Germans. The Nazis performed an experiment on twins in the camp to see if the eugenics and genetics affected their mood and or their attitude. The leader of this experiment was Dr. Josef Mengele, he has performed over 1,500 of these experiments on imprisoned twins, but there are some ups and downs about the experiment because there have only been fewer than 200 twins survived the study. The Luftwaffe conducted an experiment on how to treat hypothermia in the early 1940s. The way they conducted the experiment was they would fill a tank full of ice and water; they put the victim in it for up to three hours. During July 1942 to September 1943, some experiments would have pretty bad wounds on the subjects there would be victims infected with such as streptococcus, gas gangrene, and tetanus. The Nazis are a group that didn’t care about anyone but themselves,
AV. Pathways to human experimentation, 1933-1945: Germany, Japan, and the United States. In: Sachse C, Walker M, eds. Osiris, 2nd Series, Volume 20, Politics and Science in Wartime: Comparative International Perspectives on the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; 2005:205-231.