Main description:

Unlike Nazi medical experiments, euthanasia during the Third Reich is barely studied or taught. Often, even asking whether euthanasia during the Third Reich is relevant to contemporary debates about physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia is dismissed as inflammatory. Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: Before, During, and After the Holocaust explores the history of euthanasia before and during the Third Reich in depth and demonstrate how Nazi physicians incorporated mainstream Western philosophy, eugenics, population medicine, prevention, and other medical ideas into their ideology. This book reveals that euthanasia was neither forced upon physicians nor wantonly practiced by a few fanatics, but widely embraced by Western medicine before being sanctioned by the Nazis. Contributors then reflect on the significance of this history for contemporary debates about PAS and euthanasia. While they take different views regarding these practices, almost all agree that there are continuities between the beliefs that the Nazis used to justify euthanasia and the ideology that undergirds present-day PAS and euthanasia. This conclusion leads our scholars to argue that the history of Nazi medicine should make society wary about legalizing PAS or euthanasia and urge caution where it has been legalized.

Contents:

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Sheldon Rubenfeld

Part I: The History of Physician-Assisted Suicide, Euthanasia and the Third Reich, and Their Current State of Affairs in Europe

1. On a Slippery Slope: The Historical Debate on Euthanasia in Germany

Gerrit Hohendorf

2. International and German Eugenics from ca. 1880 up to Post-World War II Period: Medical Expertise-Political Ambition-Relations to Euthanasia in the Nazi Context

Volker Roelcke

3. Euthanasia in Nazi Germany: Children's Euthanasia Program, Aktion T4, and Decentralized Killing

Gerrit Hohendorf

4. Ethics and Ideology for Future Doctors: How Nazi Values Were Taught in the German Medical Curriculum 1939-1945

Florian Bruns

5. A Protagonist's View of Euthanasia in the Netherlands Today

Eduard (A.A.E.) Verhagen

6. The Case Against Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia

Stephan Sahm

7. Palliative Medicine and the Debate on Physician-Assisted Death in Germany

H. Christof Muller-Busch

Part II. Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia After the Third Reich

8. Helping the Few: Historical Perspectives on Aid-In-Dying

Barron Lerner

9. Palliative Care, Hospice, and Last-Resort Options

Timothy E. Quill

10. Race and Physician-Assisted Death: Do Black Lives Matter?

Alan Elbaum and LaVera Crawley

11. Understanding the Role of Suffering in Legalized Physician-Assisted Dying

Robert A. Pearlman

12. Physician Countertransference and Patient Requests for a Hastened Death

Diane E. Meier

13. The Value of Life vs. the Principle of Autonomy

Avraham Steinberg

14. The Distinction Between Voluntary and Involuntary Euthanasia and the Critical Role of Eugenics

James Downar

15. Euthanasia Old and New: Lives Not Worth Living and Unequal Respect for Autonomy

Scott Y. H. Kim

16. Can a Person Ever Be "Not Useful"? A Critical Analysis of the Anthropological Roots of Euthanasia Under National Socialism and Today

Ashley K. Fernandes

17. The Best Physicians Are Destined for Hell

Kenneth Prager

18. Pediatric Euthanasia: A Call for Civil Disobedience

Eric Kodish

19. "The Syringe Belongs in the Hand of a Physician"

Power, Authority, Control, Death, and the Patient-Physician Relationship

Daniel P. Sulmasy

About the Contributors

Index