The Cure
Doctors have been present in society since there has been illness. There is a sacred trust given to doctors by their patients that can only be broken by failures of human nature. In his book, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton describes a situation that can be described as a collapse of judgment and of understanding, what it is that doctors do. In Nazi Germany, doctors found ways to excuse actions that are directly opposed to the Hippocratic Oath which are both surprising and disturbing.
The Hippocratic Oath maintains that doctors must do no harm to patients and must do all in their power to both help their charges and preserve the art that of maintaining a medical practice. While there was a lot of falsification upon the state’s side, the doctors in Nazi Germany performed the dirty deeds. What entails a doctor’s role in society? If it is their job to save lives; doesn’t it make sense that the role of doctor can include the choice of what lives to save? Whatever debates erupt from these questions, one thing is certain, the role of doctors has never included killing on purpose. Although the idea of euthanasia has been gaining popularity over the years, stronger ideas of ethnic cleansing and ridding the Earth of “life unworthy of life” emerged in Germany.
“[Adolf] Jost argued that control over the death of the individual must ultimately belong to the social organism, the state. This concept is in direct opposition to the Anglo-American tradition of euthanasia, which emphasizes the individual's "right to die" or "right to death" or "right to his or her own death," as the ultimate human claim. In contrast, Jost was pointing to the state's right to kill. While he spoke of compassion and relief of suffering of the incurably ill, his focus was mainly on the health of the Volk and the state. He pointed out that the state already exercises those "rights" in war, where thousands of in dividuals are sacrificed for the good of the state. Ultimately the argument...
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