Murderous Medicine

Chanced upon this book at JE library..
It talked about the Holocaust and interestingly some ethical issues about medicine surfaced just when i thought the Nazis killed the Jews without any need for excuses in the 2nd World War.. (Interesting that i also completed Call of Duty 2 recently.. what a coincidence..)

1) Eugenics had already evolved in the Nazi realm.. People of the Aryan race were favoured and all the handicapped, either intellectually or physically were disposed of literally by any means deemed legal then.. These done in the hope that future generations will be free of disabilities.

2) Then come the issue of communication with patients.. Typhus was endemic then in Germany and the Nazis were manipulative enough to make most believe that Typhus was spread by the Jews. Hordes of Jews were then "exiled" into Ghettos with conditions so bad that even bathing a hundred times a day will fail to rid the risk of being bitten by lice, the vector for Typhus..
So what do the Nazis do when a Jew is suspected of Typhus? They will line the 'patients' up into 'shower rooms' with a space to accommodate hundreds in the pretext of disinfecting them.. But instead of water coming from the showers, it was cyanide gas... No Nazi doctor told the patients of the real 'treatment'.

3) Last of which is patient's consent.. the many deaths caused by these executions yield thousands of samples for the German doctors either for research or for sale of skeletons/body parts.. Of course the doctors never asked patients if they were willing to donate their body for research.. The poor people don't even know they are being killed!!

One wonders how such hatred can surface that fellow human beings are no longer treated as equals. I can so easily say the Nazis were real cruel.. But i really wonder if i were born an Aryan, and told since birth all the bad things in the world about the Jews whether true or not.. Will i still see this episode in the same light as i would now?

Anyway, this book is quite good to read in the beginning.. Even tells of the origin of the name Rickettsia Prowazeckie but as the book goes on.. facts repeat themselves repeatedly.. (ya note: repeat repeatedly..) only to highlight the author's hatred of the Nazis. Well who could blame her? I ended up not being able to finish the book...