The Lancet initiated a “Commission on Medicine and the Holocaust: Historical Evidence, Implications for Today, Teaching for Tomorrow”. Not a tribute paid (and it would still be appropriate) to memory. Lancet it tells us that that period must be at the center of a bioethical and epistemological reflection, because it has repercussions on today. And he motivates the need for an investigation by speaking of “long-established myths about the relationship between the Nazi regime and medicine”. Myths that it is time to deny and dissolve for the undeniable consequences they have on today.
In fact, it is a myth that only a handful of fanatics committed atrocities, and it is a myth that the science expressed in the Nazi context was only “pseudoscience”, and therefore not only anetic but completely useless. So, he says Lancet: Much remains of Nazi biomedicine in ours. It will certainly be interesting to see the responsibilities of German and Austrian doctors reconstructed, and of those operating in the occupied territories, on eugenics, mass sterilizations, identification of the so-called “biologically inferior subjects”, and it will be another confirmation of historical atrocities.
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But perhaps it will be even more so to discover, for example, in which contexts the identification of the “biologically different” slides towards discrimination and / or diversification of treatments. Today, at the time of DNA, of the identification of genetic diversity as a ground for better treating people with personalized medicine, we need to know what prejudices are lurking every time we talk about “biologically different”.
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Looking for the roots, we try to define the fine line that separates the stigmatization of the “non-white Caucasian” from the studies that investigate the differences to give better clinical input, for example. Not only that: the commission of Lancet it will also investigate the relationships between “organized medicine” (let’s call it health) and governments, state policies, the demands of politics. A theme that Covid has brought us home for a year now. It is worth reflecting on. Fearless. For this we will follow the studies of the Commission and we invite you to follow them in the Lancet.
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