International Perspectives on Medicine and the Holocaust

Abstract

The Colloquium on the History of Psychiatry and Medicine has been offered since 1989 through the Harvard Medical School, McLean Hospital Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education, and the Countway Library’s Center for the History of Medicine. It offers people working at their clinical, research, or other occupations an opportunity to step back and see their working lives in the context of the past and the future. It could be argued that it is only in such a historical context that our activities and life as a whole has meaning. And it could be argued that workers in the field make unique contributions to history as well as other fields of research. In spring 2021, the Colloquium was privileged to present a series of lectures entitled “International Perspectives on Medicine and the Holocaust”, organized by David Satin, Sabine Hildebrandt, and Benjamin Kuntz, and presented by a group of international researchers. The mid twentieth century’s rise of extremist political systems, wars, and struggles for principles of behavior, governance, and justice confront humankind with moral issues writ large. Medicine is a societal institution that carries an especially weighty tradition of social responsibility and ethical ideals. How did medicine respond to these societal distortions? How was it influenced by its social environment and how did it, in turn, affect them? Now, too, we are wrestling with great social pressures. How are we coping? What do we have to learn from the great cauldron of the mid twentieth century and its Holocaust? And can we learn?