Main description:

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As historian and anatomist Sabine Hildebrandt reveals, however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the "future dead."

Contents:

Foreword

William Seidelman

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and German Terms

Introduction

Chapter 1. History of research on medicine and anatomy in National Socialism

Chapter 2. Anatomy and related sciences before 1933

Chapter 3. The interaction between the NS state and anatomists

Chapter 4. The NS state and the Anatomische Gesellschaft

Chapter 5. Anatomists who became victims of NS policies

Chapter 6. Anatomists working in NS Germany

Chapter 7. NS victims and the use of their bodies for anatomical purposes

Chapter 8. The science of anatomy in NS Germany

Chapter 9. After the war

Chapter 10. Developments in professional ethics in anatomy

Chapter 11. Anatomy- on the edge of culture

Appendix: Tables 1-6

Index