Polak Rabbi Joseph
Chief Justice, Rabbinical Court of Boston, Massachusetts.
Boston University School of Public Health.
J Biocommun. 2021 Aug 15;45(1):E10. doi: 10.5210/jbc.v45i1.10810. eCollection 2021.
An historian of World War II Germany was asked, about whether there was a single ideological notion that proved to be the most influential in allowing the horrific evils of the Holocaust to take place. It is the very idea, derived from the Romantics, he wrote, that artists are entitled to live outside of morality. Hitler and others unquestionably saw themselves in this way. With this realization we have arrived at the reductio ad absurdum of this Romantic ethic: the Artist as Murderer. And it is because we believe that like artists, physicians occupy a higher sphere, that we have, in Holocaust times, the transformation of the physician, like the artist, into the murderer. Like the artist, who murders but does not do so with his own hand, the physician supervises executions and unspeakable experiments. Anatomists buttressed their collections at a range of German and Austrian universities, by placing orders from among the executed and about-to-be executed. It is this that I have in mind when I speak of "murder-a-la-carte." Pernkopf was one of these anatomists. Through the atlas he immortalizes the victims. Years later, a surgeon asks about the atlas and protocols for continued use, to benefit patients and educate, are created. The surgeon may well be rescuing the medical profession itself from its own historical sins of presumed unaccountability, of returning it to a human place where the dignity of the patient remains inviolable, and where the victims of medically inspired evil gaze out at us from the pages of the atlas, both as a blessing and as a warning.
一位研究二战时期德国的历史学家被问及，是否存在一种单一的意识形态观念，被证明是在允许大屠杀的恐怖罪恶发生方面最具影响力的。他写道，正是源自浪漫主义者的观念，即艺术家有权生活在道德之外。希特勒和其他人无疑是以这种方式看待自己的。有了这种认识，我们就得出了这种浪漫主义伦理的荒谬结论：艺术家即凶手。而且正是因为我们相信，与艺术家一样，医生也处于一个更高的层面，所以在大屠杀时期，我们看到了医生像艺术家一样变成了凶手。就像艺术家杀人但不是亲自动手一样，医生监督处决和不可言喻的实验。解剖学家通过从被处决者和即将被处决者中下单，充实了德国和奥地利一系列大学的藏品。我所说的“点菜式谋杀”指的就是这个。佩恩科夫就是这些解剖学家之一。通过那本图谱，他让受害者得以不朽。多年后，一位外科医生询问关于该图谱的情况，并制定了继续使用它以造福患者和用于教学的方案。这位外科医生很可能是在将医学专业从其自身被假定无需承担责任的历史罪孽中拯救出来，将其带回一个患者尊严不可侵犯的人道之地，在那里，医学引发的罪恶的受害者从图谱的页面中凝视着我们，既是一种祝福，也是一种警示。
