Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race
Edited by:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004 226 pp. hardcover, $45 ISBN 0-807829-161 | ISBN: 0-807-82916-1
Reading Deadly Medicine is like reading an autopsy report on a person you know. It is painful and disturbing, yet forces you to examine some of your most terrifying fears. The book accompanies an exhibit at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. It is a big book—better suited to a coffee table than a bookcase. The seven invited authors who wrote the background for each segment of the escalating horror did a good job. They recognize the complexity of how scientists get sucked into support of the state even when the ideology of the state goes against their original training and beliefs. It is particularly unsettling that the science that contributed most to what the book's subtitle calls 'creating the master race' is genetics. If physicists feel guilt for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so, as this book brings out, do geneticists for 'deadly medicine', which originated in part from the eugenics movement not just in Germany, but in almost every industrial nation of the first half of the twentieth century.
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