Past Events
May 16th, 2019
Title: How Healers Became Killers: Nazi Doctors and Modern Medical Ethics
Dr. Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH, FACP
Director, Center for Bioethics and Humanities
Professor, University of Colorado School of Medicine and Colorado School of Public Health
University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus
Fulginiti Pavilion for Bioethics and Humanities
Description: The terrible history of health professional involvement in the Holocaust has a greater influence on medical ethics than any other event. In the first lecture in the Silvers lectureship, Dr. Wynia explores how the ethics of genetics, informed consent, public health, death and dying, abortion, and medical research have all been deeply influenced by the crimes of the Nazi doctors.
January 27th, 2020
Title: Nazi Anatomy: Restoration of the Victims' Biographies
Sabine Hildebrandt, MD
Associate Professor of Pediatrics
Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine
Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
Div. General Pediatrics, Dept. Pediatrics
Description: Anatomists used the bodies of Nazi victims in education and research, committing many serious ethical transgressions. Anatomists even
experimented on living prisoners of the Nazi regime, and two anatomists
contributed to the murder of these prisoners. Victims were buried in unmarked
graves or “lost” in collections, without names and thus hidden from history.
This presentation will describe how historians and anatomists have brought
these ethical transgressions to light and, equally importantly, have started to systematically restore the biographies of the victims so that they are once again known to the world by name.
April 14, 2022
Title: Man, Descending: Eugenics in Indiana and Germany
Dr. Richard Gunderman, MD, PhD
Chancellor's Professor, IU - Indianapolis
John A. Campbell Professor of Radiology
Professor of Radiology & Imaging Sciences
Professor of Pediatrics
Professor of Medical Education
Professor of Philosophy, School of Liberal Arts
Professor of Medical Humanities & Health Studies, School of Liberal Arts
Adjunct Professor, School of Philanthropy
Description: Eugenicists in the United States, building on the breakthroughs of Darwin and Mendel, aimed to protect the human gene pool by preventing “inferior” human beings from reproducing. What they unleashed, however, was a terrible tide of dehumanization and inhumanity, both here at home in Indiana and in far-away Germany. The lessons of their efforts, though difficult to contemplate, must never be forgotten
