Professor Leo Alexander explains the results of German medical experimentation on a Polish student, Jadwiga Dzido, carried out at Ravensbruck concentration camp.
Dear Stan,
Further to my recent post on the dodgy ethics of the medical profession, HERE is an enthralling extract from the archives of the revered BMJ (British Medical Journal). Plainly there was little difference between the ethical attitudes of British, American and German doctors in the 1940s. It is the first time I have ever seen Dachau described as a "reasonably humane" concentration camp. And this phrase was not used by some Nazi lunatic. Among its other horrors, Dachau was the imprisonment site for 2,000 Catholic priests who had upset the Nazis in some way.
I particularly loved Lord Moran whining about his expenses, showing yet again how Mammon is the main motive for some doctors. "50 guineas a day" was £52.50 a day or roughly $240 a day in the 1940s exchange rates. In other words, one day's pay for Lord Moran was more than a month's pay for a working joe in Britain or the USA at that time......
Plainly the most senior people in the British medical establishment did not like the prosecution of Nazi doctors or even free reporting of the "experiments", obviously suspecting that they might find themselves on the gallows if the general public knew too much about their practices.
Click link for article: NUREMBERG DOCTORS' TRIAL: Human guinea pigs and the ethics of experimentation [BMJ 1996;313:1467-1470 (7 December)]
