Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race William E. Seidelman Susan Bachrach and Dieter Kuntz , eds. Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004. xiii + 226 pp. Ill. $45.00 (0-8078-2916-1). (Distributed by University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC 27515.) This is a book of substance in both presentation and content. Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race is the companion volume to an exhibition of the same name at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The exhibition and this [End Page 602] publication represent a notable event in the history of Holocaust scholarship—namely, recognition of the role of medical science by a leading Holocaust museum and documentation center. The volume is an anthology of essays documenting the evolution of the Holocaust, from eugenic and racial theory to enforced sterilization, leading to the medicalized mass killing of German children and adults and, inexorably, to the "Final Solution." The book is enhanced by remarkable illustrations. A particularly notable photograph (p. 122) is that of attendees at a 1937 anthropology conference in Tübingen: on the far left of the picture is the young Dr. Josef Mengele; on the right side are prominent pioneers in Nazi racial science, professors Alfred Ploetz, Eugen Fisher, and Mengele's mentor, Otmar von Verschuer. The essays are written by outstanding historians, including the American scholars Sheila Faith Weiss, Daniel Kevles, and Henry Friedlander; German scholars Gisela Bock and Benno Müller-Hill; British historian Michael Burleigh; and French scholar Benoît Massin. The basic themes of the essays are eugenics, racism, sterilization, euthanasia, and the programs of extermination leading to the Final Solution. Weiss provides insights into the evolution of eugenic and racial thinking in Germany leading up to the Hitler regime. Kevles documents universal international aspects of eugenics. Bock provides an incisive overview of eugenic sterilization and reproduction policies in Nazi Germany. Massin addresses the subject of anthropology, including the anthropological studies carried out by the Vienna Museum of Natural History and the University of Vienna. Burleigh's and Friedlander's essays deal with the evolution of medicalized killing, euphemistically known as "euthanasia," that culminated in the Final Solution. An introductory overview is provided by the exhibit's curator, Barbara Bachrach. The concluding essay, by geneticist Müller-Hill, provides an important historical and moral assessment of the implications of the Nazi experience for genetics and science today. Each of the essays is an impressive scholarly work. Regrettably, however, there is a major omission: while the title is Deadly Medicine, the volume does not substantively address the subjects of medical practice, regulation, organization, research, and education. Some of these subjects are touched on with respect to individuals and institutions, but there is no overarching consideration of how the culture of medicine in the Third Reich became "deadly," how the medical community that gave birth to modern medical science became an agent of the Nazi state. No significant reference is made to Michael Kater's work documenting the representation and role of physicians in the Nazi Party and Hitler regime (The Nazi Party, 1983; Doctors under Hitler, 1989). No consideration is given to Robert Proctor's seminal work The Nazi War on Cancer (2000), which details the paradoxical relationship between Nazi philosophy and progressive attitudes toward public health and prevention in medical research and practice. The essays do not address the subject of physician (or scientist) education, with the inculcation of racist ideology and the exploitation of victims, both living and dead, for "teaching" and research in the German/Austrian universities, medical schools, [End Page 603] teaching hospitals, and research institutes. Using the parlance of the twenty-first century, there is no consideration of the transfer of knowledge from the scientists of the Third Reich to the practitioners. These criticisms notwithstanding, this is an outstanding and important volume. It deserves reprinting in a soft-cover format that would make it accessible to a wider readership, students in particular. William E. Seidelman University of Toronto (emeritus) Copyright © 2005 The Johns Hopkins University Press
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".