Featured Books: Archives
Location: History of Medicine & Health Care Collection
Call Number: HQ 751 P445b 1996a
Though little known today, Dr. Harry J. Haiselden, a Chicago physician shocked the nation in 1915 by boldly revealing that he practiced what some would call infanticide. The doctor defiantly defended his right to withhold medical treatment of so called "defective" newborns. Inciting a firestorm, Haiselden began a widespread publicity campaign to convince the medical world and the general public of the morality of his actions—eliminating those infants he considered "unfit" to live.
Haiselden's most effective publicity was his sensational film, The Black Stork. Pure propaganda, the melodrama extolled the advantages of selective breeding and warned of the danger of couples with genetic disorders marrying and having children. His film dramatized the health benefits of not treating "defective" newborns, leaving them to die for their own good, the good of their parents, and the good of society. In his engaging book of the same title, medical historian Martin Pernick skillfully analyzes the powerful effects of The Black Stork. Using examples from other motion pictures and the popular press, he reveals how the mass media both reflected and shaped America's attitude toward eugenics and euthanasia.
The first half of Pernick's book provides a sweeping history of the medical and moral issues surrounding eugenics and euthanasia. Derived from the Latin, i.e., eu="good" and thanatos="death", euthanasia can be passive when treatment is withheld to relieve suffering, or active when actions are taken to bring about death in a so called "mercy killing." When Haiselden brought the subject to public attention through his film, the nation was sharply divided. Some well known figures such as Clarence Darrow and Helen Keller took the side of the doctor, while eminent social reformers including Jane Addams of Hull House opposed his advocacy of passive euthanasia. Pernick shows how these conflicted attitudes toward euthanasia continue today as Americans still grapple with questions of who should live and who should die.
Through the second half of his engaging and original study, in addition to The Black Stork, Pernick uncovers over a hundred now forgotten films, showing how they influenced and revealed popular thinking about complex moral issues. Lucidly composed and thoroughly researched, Pernick's book establishes the close connection between euthanasia and eugenics, the attempt to produce superior human beings by improving hereditary traits.
To that end, in the 1920s the U.S. government passed laws banning supposedly undesirable immigrant groups from entering the country. In addition, by 1939 an estimated 20,000 of the "unfit" had been sterilized, including African Americans, alcoholics, the immoral, criminals, prostitutes, and the mentally ill. Pernick traces how America's interest in eugenics can be linked to the Nazis' willingness to use murder to purify the race. He regrets that a movement in this country to overcome inherited diseases degenerated into what he considers "genocide," all because of hatred based on race, class, ethnicity, and gender.
Pernick exposes the limitation of the progressive era's belief that objective science could resolve troubling ethical dilemmas. Subtly influenced by culture and tradition, even seemingly objective science is value laden, yet the public has tended to leave grave decisions about life and death to those whose judgments are all too subjective. The author maintains that scientists, alone, are not equipped to decide about the treatment of those whose lives might never be normal, but who arguably deserve the right to life.
The controversial Baby Doe cases in the early 1980s brought about federal attempts to prohibit euthanasia but the Supreme Court overturned these laws and left such regulations to the states. Today, doctors have been left with a great deal of personal discretion. However, because of the patient's rights movements of the 1970s, rather than the involuntary euthanasia of the past, it is now more common for the withholding of treatment to be authorized by advanced directives. Nevertheless, as Pernick reveals so well, controversies that divided America in 1910 remain to trouble us as we argue questions about quality of life and how it may be achieved. He shows how such questions are complicated by new discoveries in genetics and advances in bioengineering, as we continue to confront perplexing issues of science and morality, life and death.
Lori Arviso Alvord, M.D., and Elizabeth Cohen Van Pelt, The Scalpel and The Silver Bear, Bantam Books, 2000. Reviewed by Harvey Fenigsohn.
Location: History of Medicine & Health Care Collection; Humanities in Medicine Collection
Call Number: WZ 100 A476s 2000
In The Scalpel and the Silver Bear, Lori Arviso Alvord relates the inspiring story of her life as she became the first Navajo woman surgeon. Never forgetting her native roots, Dr. Alvord strongly advocates blending western medicine with the traditional healing of the Navajos. She reveals how Native Americans' almost miraculous curative practices transcend the limitations of today's medical science with its dominant emphasis on pathology and technology. We learn that modern medicine has much to gain from the spiritual values of an ancient people.
The daughter of a white mother and an Indian father, Dr. Alvord's childhood in New Mexico straddled both worlds, but she seems to have responded most deeply to her Navajo heritage. In this moving, compelling autobiography, we follow her from her earliest days on the reservation to her undergraduate years at Dartmouth and on to Stanford for medical school and residency. Dr. Alvord then went home to the reservation as a surgeon at Gallup Indian Medical Center, determined to better the lives of her people. She currently practices at Dartmouth Medical School and serves as Associate Dean of Student and Multicultural Affairs and Assistant Professor of Surgery and Psychiatry.
Bright and ambitious, Lori Arviso originally left New Mexico to attend college on a scholarship. As a woman and as a Native American, she felt doubly alienated, but found comfort with the few Native American classmates at Dartmouth. She learned to overcome the Navajo's characteristic reticence and reserve, distinguishing herself academically and gaining admission to Stanford's prestigious medical school where she completed her surgical training. Again finding herself in the minority--an Indian woman in general surgery--she more than proved herself by becoming chief resident in a field traditionally dominated by white males. Returning home, she dedicated herself to merging the medical expertise of a skilled surgeon with the holistic medicine of a native healer.
At Gallup, she encountered patients reluctant to establish eye contact, fearful of being touched, resistant to having organs removed from the body - in short, thoroughly intimidated by Dr. Alvord's modern methods. She soon realized that only by winning her patients' trust could she really be most effective. She learned to approach them gradually, to establish her credibility as a fellow Indian, and always to respect their native beliefs. Dr. Alvord explained how the Indians strive to live a life in harmony with the natural world. Concerned with the whole being of a person, tribal medicine is based on a healing philosophy called "Walking in Beauty." The Navajos sensed their mystical connection with the universe, seeking a balance of body, mind, and spirit.
With this wisdom, Dr. Alvord convinces us that there is more to medicine than science. From her, for example, we learn the power of song in healing. When an old man was sick in the Gallop hospital with cancer, a hataali, or medicine man, performed a "sing," a ceremony of chanting. The elderly Indian was being treated with chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, but he began to show signs of recovery only after the trusted shaman sang at his bedside. The medicine man gave his patient something modern medical science could not provide - hope.
Dr. Alvord is quite aware that today's physicians might well dismiss such unscientific practices, considering them to be based on ignorance and superstition. She is not advocating that modern medicine adopt the healing rituals and ceremonies of the Navajo. Instead, she emphasizes how native medicine provides a model of personal care far too often missing from today's hospitals and doctors' offices. As she writes:
Now, more than ever, patients themselves feel removed and forgotten, powerless in the face of the institutions that were created to help them ... modern medicine has become a one-way system - from physicians to patient. Physicians do the directing, talking at their patients ... listening on the part of the physician is becoming lost ... Patients want to be involved ... They want to feel more than a set of organs and bones, nerves and blood, and participate in restoring their bodies to health.
As a surgeon at the reservation hospital and later, as a medical school professor at Dartmouth, Dr. Alvord has stressed the need for physicians to respect the emotional and spiritual needs of their patients as well as their physical requirements. For her, the ideal hospital would combine state-of-the-art technology with a serene, warm, and comfortable setting, one with natural light and free of the harsh, sterile, clinical atmosphere of so many modern facilities. She points out that respected medical journals report the benefits of community and spirituality in reducing patients' mortality and promoting their healing.
In speaking out, Dr. Alvord's voice has been heard. Her memoir is now read in many undergraduate and medical school courses, and is popular with reading groups around the country. In demand as a speaker, Dr. Alvord has garnered numerous honors including two honorary degrees and an Outstanding Women in Medicine award. In her life and in her spirit, Lori Arviso Alvord is indeed a woman who demonstrates what it means to "Walk in Beauty."
Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer. Princeton University Press, 1999. Reviewed by Harvey Fenigsohn.
Location: Book Collection (1st floor)
Call Number: WA 11 GG4 P799n 1999
In The Nazi War on Cancer, historian Robert Proctor asks how a nation responsible for so much death could nevertheless make outstanding contributions to the preservation of life. In this subtle, nuanced study, written in an engaging, lucid style, Proctor uncovers what he calls "the 'flip side' of fascism" (277). He discloses the hitherto little-known fact that Hitler's followers, despite all of their unforgivable crimes against humanity, implemented highly enlightened public health measures, making unprecedented advances in toxicology and epidemiology. In analyzing this paradox, he raises profound moral questions we have yet to answer. What are we to make of a nation that justified castrating thousands of "defectives," conducted sadistic medical experiments, and systematically executed millions, yet pioneered health reforms we now emulate? Concentrating on one disease, he explains that the Nazis viewed cancer as more than an organic illness. Rather, for Hitler's Germans, cancer was a metaphor for all the racial and cultural impurities they intended to eradicate in order to establish their fascist utopia.
To achieve their goals, the Germans were determined to recreate their society, and in many ways they made significant and even admirable efforts to achieve a healthy populace. Proctor asserts that the Nazis established health programs that "today we might regard as 'progressive' or even socially responsible" (5). To prove this, he makes use of impressive documentation in both German and English, drawing from both scholarly sources and popular writing.
We learn that the Nazis were dedicated environmentalists, the first to discover the many carcinogenic effects of the workplace. Proctor shows them making strenuous efforts to overcome the occupational hazards of asbestos and radiation, and to reduce the cancerous effects of preservatives, food dyes, and pesticides. Linking lung cancer to smoking, and stomach cancer to drinking, they launched aggressive propaganda against alcohol and tobacco. The Nazis also realized the nutritional advantages of high fiber, urging the consumption of fruits and vegetables and passing laws making bakeries produce only whole grain bread. Indeed, the Fürher himself gave up smoking and was a confirmed vegetarian.
Though he convinces us that the Nazis were ahead of their time in improving public health, Proctor never lets us forget the grotesque barbarism of a society ruthlessly bent on achieving total physical perfection. As in his earlier work, Racial Hygiene (1988), Proctor shows that German medical science often reflected the pathology of racism. He describes the malign research of a truly maniacal scientist, Josef Mengele, the SS doctor of Auschwitz, who injected dyes into the eyes of living subjects to determine if brown eyes could be changed into blue ones. We are reminded that concentration camp victims were immersed in freezing water to measure precisely how long it took a person to die in icy cold conditions. Euthanasia, sterilization, and ultimately the Final Solution of genocide: all were justified as vital to the progress of National Socialism.
Ironically, if not for their political biases and racist fantasies, the Nazis would have made even greater strides in overcoming disease. Jewish physicians and scientists were in the forefront of cancer research. Nevertheless, rather than degrade their society with non-Aryans, the Nazis purged Jews from the medical community, sentencing them to the gas chambers. No pollution, whether racial, religious, or ideological, was to be tolerated if the Übermenschen were to achieve their dream of world domination.
Most interesting is the author's concern with the troubling ethical issues raised by Nazi medical research. He wonders "how the routine practice of science can so easily coexist with the routine exercise of cruelty" (278). He points out that Nazi medical data is often viewed as "tainted," but the Allies nevertheless used this data. In fact, Josef Mengele has a paper listed in Index Medicus. Proctor notes that a widely consulted text on anatomy, the Pernkopf Atlas, made use of cadavers from the death camps.1 He asks us to consider: should this work be suppressed or dedicated to the memory of the victims?
Proctor reminds us that the Nazis were aware of racial segregation in America and that we, too, once sterilized the mentally ill and abusively experimented on human subjects. We are reminded that no society can ignore the ethical implications of their scientific advances. In The Nazi War on Cancer, Robert Proctor makes a significant contribution to medical history and challenges us to think deeply about the complex confluence of politics, science, and morality.
The views and opinions expressed in these reviews are strictly those of the author. Comments and suggestions may be sent to Harvey Fenigsohn.