IDS 385R/ILA 790R/HIST 385 Fall 2009 Nazi Politics and Medicine Wed 11:45-1:30pm Callaway S103
Instructors: Prof. Sander Gilman (S420-Callaway, [email protected]) Asst. Prof. Astrid M. Eckert (217 Bowden Hall, ph: 7-1096, [email protected])
Office Hours: Prof. Gilman by appointment (please email Dr. Gilman to set up an appointment) Prof. Eckert Wed, 2-4pm and by appointment.
Course description: Medicine in Germany from 1933 to 1945 provides extreme examples of the excesses of modern medical culture. This course, sponsored by the Holocaust Museum (Washington), will examine questions such as the biologization of politics; models of public health - euthanasia and sterilization; the death camps and medical research - race and genetics; alternative medicine; gender roles in medicine: doctors and nurses in Nazi culture; disability and citizenship -- the origin of informed consent and the Nuremberg Medical Code. All of these questions will be introduced by an overview of the political history and ideology of German culture from the 1920s to 1945. This class is simultaneously offered in the College (History, IDS, ILA); The Schools of Medicine, Public Health and Nursing.
Course Requirements:
40% Attendance and active participation 5% annotated bibliography 5% draft topic 10% first draft 40% final draft
The papers for graduate students in this class are 20-25 pages in length, those for College undergraduates 15-20pp. Further details for course requirements are to be worked out with the instructors based on the requirements of each college.
Course Website & Communication:
This class is sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). The Museum grants us exclusive access to a website containing images and primary sources. A lot of this material has been translated for our class and is available for the first time in English. Please make active use of these materials for your papers. You find the website here: http://resources.ushmm.org/deadlymedicine/class/ The site is password protected. You will receive username and password in class.
For this class, a LearnLink conference has been set up which will be our main communication platform. Please check the conference frequently, it will contain announcements, further information and, hopefully, some discussion.
Books to Buy
Available at the Emory Bookstore:
1) Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988). 2) Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1961.
Note: The bookstore will begin returning books by September 7! Make sure to have your books before that date!
Course Policies:
This course adheres to the Emory College‟s Honor Code, found at: http://www.college.emory.edu/current/standards/honor_code.html
This course follows the rules outlined in the Honor Code, especially where plagiarism is concerned. If we suspect that any writing assignment (including the draft paper) is plagiarized, either in part or in its entirety, we are required to hand the matter over to the Honor Council. This also applies to “patching,” the practice of copying a sentence and exchanging a word or two. If you are not fully aware of what plagiarism is, ask us and/or refer to the honor code. It is your duty to be fully aware what plagiarism is. If in doubt, ask!
Assignments must be turned in on the day and time indicated on this syllabus. Late submissions will be marked down by half a grade per day late. For example, if you have written a B paper, you will receive a B- if you have turned it in one day late, a C+ for two days late, etc. Papers with frequent grammatical and spelling errors are ineligible for any grade better than B.
Grading Scale:
A 100-94 A- 93-90 B+ 89-87 B 86-83 B- 80-82 C+ 79-76 C 75-73 C- 72-70 D+ 69-67 D 66-64 F 64 or lower
Course Schedule
W 9/2 The healing-to-killing road of Nazi Medicine
How did the health-science profession in Germany get on the trajectory from healing to killing? What is the relevance of the Nazi medical crimes to the health-science profession today? Is scientific research „neutral‟? Is it ethically permissable to use data from Nazi experiments for research today? How do human rights and medicine intersect?
Readings:
Michael Burleigh, “Eugenic Utopias and the Genetic Present,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1 (2000), pp. 56-77.
W 9/9 The 19th century intellectual roots of eugenical thinking, social engineering and hygiene
Readings: Diane Paul, “Darwin, Social Darwinism and Eugenics”, in Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (Cambridge UP, 2003), pp. 214-239.
Richard Weikart, “Darwinism and Death: Devaluing Human Life in Germany 1859-1920,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Apr., 2002), pp. 323-344.
Primary Sources: 1) Charles Darwin: “The Origins of Species” (1859) 2) Francis Galton: “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims” (1909) Please note: both texts are in ONE file on e-reserve.
Extra Graduate Student Reading: Richard J. Evans, "In Search of German Social Darwinism: The History and Historiography of a Concept," in Medicine and Modernity: Public Health and Medical Care in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Manfred Berg and Geoffrey Cocks (Washington, 1997), 55-79.
W 9/16 The Weimar Years, 1919-1933
Readings: Sheila Weiss, “German Eugenics, 1890-1933,” in Susan Bachrach, ed., Deadly Medicine. Creating the Master Race (Washington, D. C.: USHMM, 2004), 15-40.
Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988), pp. 1-45 (= introduction and ch. 1).
Primary Sources: Baur-Fischer-Lenz, Human Heredity (1931), excerpts. (on e-reserve)
Extra Graduate Student Reading: Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 Cambridge Monographs in the History of Medicine, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 399-439.
W 9/23 The Rise & Consolidation of National Socialism
Readings: Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 44-73 (“Barbarism Institutionalized”).
Richard J. Evans, “The Emergence of Nazi Ideology”, in Jane Caplan, ed., Nazi Germany (Short Oxford History of Germany) Oxford UP, 2008, pp. 26-47.
Primary Sources: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, excerpts
W 9/30 Women in National Socialism: The Politics of the Reproducing Body
Readings: Atina Grossmann, The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.136-60.
Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988), pp. 120-30.
Gisela Bock, “Anti-natalism, Maternity and Paternity in National Socialist Racism,” in David Crew, ed., Nazism and German Society, 1933- 1945(1994), pp. 110-140.
Adelheid von Saldern, “Victims or Perpetrators? Controversies about the role of women in the Nazi state,” in David Crew, ed., Nazism and German Society, 1933-1945(1994), pp. 141-165.
Elizabeth Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Satus in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Univ. of California Press, 1999), ch. 2, pp. 17-43.
W 10/7 Race and Medicine -- Doctors and Patients
Readings: Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp. 10-45; 223-250.
Michael H. Kater, Doctors under Hitler (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp.111-149.
DEADLINE: Submit the annotated bibliography, listing 3 monographs and 5 articles pertaining to your project. If you want to include a title that is already part of this syllabus, you may do so but need to find an extra one so that your own research contribution is still 3 books and 5 articles.
W 10/14 The Disabled: The Deaf in the Nazi Social Order
Readings: Deaf People in Hitler's Europe, Donna F. Ryan and John S. Schuchman, eds. (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2002), pp. 15-31; 78-97; 202- 214. Please note: these texts are three different files on e-reserve.
DEADLINE: TOPIC DUE Submit a 1-2 page proposal of your research paper. What is your topic? What do you want to find out, what questions are you asking? Why does your topic matter? Which sources do you want to draw upon? This is a formal piece of writing.
W 10/21 Writing a Research Paper – Some Practical Tips
In this meeting, we will talk about the nuts „n bolts of writing a research paper: How to develop a question, structure a paper, write an introduction, assemble a bibliography, avoid plagiarism. The session is mandatory.
W 10/28 Homosexuality under National Socialism
Guest Lecture by Dr. Richard F. Wetzell, German Historical Institute (GHI), Washington, D. C.
Readings: Geoffrey Giles, "The Institutionalization of Homosexual Panic in the Third Reich," in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, ed. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stolzfus (Princeton UP, 2001), 233-255.
Stefan Micheler, “Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of Same-Sex Desiring Men under National Socialism,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2002 11(1-2): 95-130.
Primary Sources: Josef Meisinger on "Combating Homosexuality as a Political Task" (April 5-6, 1937) http://germanhistorydocs.ghi- dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1558
W 11/4 Eugenics and Euthanasia: Mental Health and the Question of “Superfluous Life”
Guest Speaker: Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ILA
Readings: Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill and London: The North Carolina University Press, 1995), pp. 1-23; 39-62; 263-283.
Proctor, Racial Hygiene, ch. 4, pp. 95-117. – on sterilization law
Proctor, Racial Hygiene, ch. 7, pp. 177-222. – on “lives not worth living”
Primary Source: Eye witness account by Lilly Offenbacher about Euthanasia (“T4”) Program, September 1941 http://germanhistorydocs.ghi- dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1529
Signed Letter by Hitler Authorizing Euthanasia Killings (backdated Sept. 1, 1939) http://germanhistorydocs.ghi- dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1528
W 11/11 Nursing and Alternative Medicine in the 3rd Reich
Readings: Anne Harrington, Re-enchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 175-206.
Susan Benedict, “Nurses‟ Participation in the Euthanasia Programs of Nazi Germany,” Western Journal of Nursing Research 21, No. 2, (1999): 246-263 http://www.baycrest.org/Winter%202002/article4.htm
Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), pp. 134-140; chapter on “Führer‟s Food”
W 11/18 The Problem of “Good” Medical Science: Tobacco and Cancer vs. “Bad” Medical Science: Mengele and the Twin Experiments
Readings: Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer, pp. 173-242; chapter on “The Campaign against Tobacco”
Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1961), 15-20, 24-28, 33-36, 56-65, 94-104, 134-137. This book is rather gripping. You might consider just reading the whole thing. It reads fast.
Eva Mozes Kor, Echoes from Auschwitz: Dr. Mengele's Twins, the Story of Eva and Miriam Mozes. (Terre Haute, IN: Candles, 1995), pp. v-iii, 91- 137. (the book is on reserve, but not the excerpt)
DEADLINE: Draft 1 due. Submit a draft of your paper. The draft must be complete and contain the bibliography (not annotated).
W 11/25 Viewing “Out of the Ashes” film based on the memoirs by Gisella Perl, I was a doctor at Auschwitz
It is College Policy that classes take place on Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
No readings – a chance to work on your papers
W 12/2 The Nuremberg Medical Trials and the Origins of Informed Consent in the United States: The “Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital Case”
This is the last class meeting.
Readings: Nuremberg Trial excerpts
Primary readings: http://www.ushmm.org/research/doctors/index.html
The “Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital Case,” Jay Katz, Experimentation with Human Beings (New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 1972), pp. 9- 65.
W 12/9 no class
DEADLINE: FINAL DRAFT DUE BY Wednesday, Dec. 9. Please email your papers in standard file format (doc or docx) to [email protected] and [email protected]. Please do not mail your papers via LearnLink. LL is unreliable.