Deadly Medicine

We had visitors in town this week so we played tour guide and took them around to see the sights. This included a visit to the World War II Museum. The museum had a special exhibit on loan from the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC titled "Deadly Medicine". It traced the use of science and eugenics by the Germans to identify racial types and people with special needs and who had various diseases in order to segregate them from society, and eventually kill them. This is the description from the brochure.

From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany carried out a campaign to “cleanse” German society of people viewed as biological threats to the nation’s “health.” Enlisting the help of physicians and medically trained geneticists, psychiatrists and anthropologists, the Nazis developed racial health policies that started with the mass sterilization of “hereditarily diseased” persons and ended with the near annihilation of European Jewry. Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race traces this history from the early 20th-century international eugenics movement to the Nazi regime’s “science of race.”

This was all done under the auspices of medical science to eliminate "worthless life". Medical panels signed off on the actions to give it the cloak of respectability. While I was walking through the exhibit I couldn't help but think about the use of medical panels in Obamacare.

"A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members ......."  Pope John Paul II