Awards
- Winner of American Medical Writers Association 2006 Special Recognition Physicians' Catego 0 (United States)
- Winner of American Medical Writers Association 2006 Special Recognition Physicians' Catego 2005 (United States)
Overview
More than 1.5 million concentration camp prisoners died of typhus, a preventable disease. Despite advances in public health measures to control and prevent typhus outbreaks, German doctors, fuelled by their racist ideology and their medieval approach to the disease, would use the disease as a form of biological warfare against Jews, Slavs, and gypsies. Jewish hospitals in ghettos would be burned - along with patients and staff - if typhus was present. In camps, even suspected typhus cases would be killed in the gas chambers or through intracardiac injections, along with their circle of associates. Typhus vaccine would be tested on prisoners deliberately infected with typhus. Only a handful of doctors would ever be prosecuted for their crimes. Against all odds, Jewish health providers would struggle to avoid the worst taking innovative steps to save lives. Despite the removal of their equipment, drugs and other resources, they organized health care administrations and took sanitary hygiene measures. Doctors were forced to conceal cases, and falsify diagnoses and cause of death in order to save lives. This important study explores the role of the International Red Cross in the typhus epidemics of the early 20th century. It details the widespread complicity of foreign companies in the Nazi typhus research. Finally, the author stresses the importance of monitoring and holding accountable the medical profession, researchers, and drug companies that continue to invest in research on biological agents as weapons of war.
Full Product Details
Author: Naomi Baumslag
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint: Praeger Publishers Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 1.70cm
, Length: 23.40cm
Weight: 0.603kg
ISBN: 9780275983123
ISBN 10: 0275983129
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 01 July 2005
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: No Longer Our Product
Availability: Out of print, replaced by POD
We will order this item for you from a manufatured on demand supplier.
Reviews
<p> The case that the Third Reich engaged in biological warfare using typhus as an ethnic cleansing agent against Jews, gypsies, and Slavs is carefully constructed and fully documented here. Typhus can assume epidemic proportions when living conditions are unsanitary and nutrition is inadequate. Baumslag demonstrates that Nazi Germany deliberately sought to create environments that would engender typhus in the ethnic communities slated for liquidation, and then transported the lice-ridden inhabitants to extermination camps as a public health necessity. That contemporary medicine and public health measures were available to prevent typhus is attested to by the fact that in WW II only 104 cases of typhus were reported in all the Allied armed forces. In contrast, at least 1.5 million prisoners died of typhus as a direct consequence of murder, malpractice, or deliberate negligence by German doctors. Through silence, interest in profit taking, and desire to engage in human experimentation, the International Red Cross, the German pharmaceutical industry, and the German medical establishment, respectively, collaborated with Hitler's Final Solution....Recommended. All academic libraries. - <p>Choice
<p> Murderous Medicine is thorough, profusely and admirably illustrated and tackles the medical issues clearly. -<p>The Jerusalem Post
Baumslag offers a wide range of disturbing material dealing with the perversion and abandonment of medical and humanitarian ideals on the part of those sworn to uphold them: in the first instance the German medical and scientific community but also international organizations like the Red Cross. Written with passionate anger for those who betrayed their calling, Baumslag is equally passionate in her praise for those in the ghettoes and in camps who struggled to do all they could to protect inmates. At the same time, she gives the general reader a lively and informative introduction to the complex interrelation of war and disease. -Solon Beinfeld Emeritus Professor of History Washington University, St. Louis
Author Information
Naomi Baumslag, M.D., M.P.H., is a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the Georgetown University Medical School.
