Exhibit remembers Nazi assault on disabled people

From The New York Times:

STONY BROOK, N.Y. -- Before the Nazis began the mass murder of Jews, they started to sterilize or kill hundreds of thousands of their own — non-Jewish Germans, including children, who were considered mentally or physically defective.
They even issued a “Ten Commandments for Choosing a Mate” that advised against marrying a person with an undesirable characteristic, or the possibility of inheriting one: “Never marry the one good person from a bad family.”

This intensive war against the “genetically unfit” is one of the areas explored in “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” a handsome and harrowing exhibition about the Nazis’ use of science, at Charles B. Wang Center at Stony Brook University through June 12. The exhibition, a traveling version of one that opened at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in April 2004, will be accompanied by 10 public events and lectures by experts in fields like medicine, history and philosophy.

Besides the extent of Nazi mutilation and murder, “it’s also surprising how accepted it was by the medical establishment in Germany,” said Jack Coulehan, a Stony Brook professor emeritus who still teaches medical ethics and was involved in bringing the exhibition to the university.

“These were all doctors who had devoted their lives to healing,” Dr. Coulehan said as he walked through the display, which includes photos, explanatory texts, excerpts from Nazi literature and eight screens showing Nazi propaganda films with English subtitles and other footage.

One film shows people in asylums, while a voiceover says that the money spent on them could be better used elsewhere. A wall of photographs focuses on 8 of the 5,000 children killed by injection or starvation. Another film features interviews with Jewish survivors, including victims of Nazi experiments on twins.

“The goal of human enhancement and ‘perfectibility’ is still alive,” said Stephen G. Post, director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics at Stony Brook, who organized the exhibition’s visit and the lecture series, which he plans to collect in a book. In his own May 4 speech, he said, he will trace “perfectibility” to a 1620s Francis Bacon novel, “The New Atlantis,” and explore questions the idea raises now.

“We have to be very careful how far we want to go,” he said. “In the Nazi era, it was mixed up with religiously based racism and hatred. But ultimately we will have the ability to design human beings with cognitive enhancements and resistance to aging.

“I can imagine enhanced human beings who think quicker and run quicker, but if they’re self-centered, nasty, brutal and vicious, what have we achieved?”

On April 23, Elof Axel Carlson, a geneticist and science historian who is also a Stony Brook professor emeritus, will talk about a Long Island connection: the privately financed Eugenics Record Office, which was established in 1910 at what is now the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The office lobbied, often successfully, for laws forcing sterilization of the “unfit” in many states. The Nazis used its model law as a basis for their own. “It was horrible,” Dr. Carlson said.

Nazi actions were based on the dangerous idea of defining humans by traits like intelligence, said Eva Feder Kittay, a Stony Brook philosophy professor whose parents survived the Holocaust and whose adult daughter is mentally disabled. She will speak on May 12. That definition leads to the idea that people “with impaired consciousness should be treated like animals,” Dr. Kittay said. “Being the mother of such a person, that doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t think you have to be a mother for that not to sit well.”

“Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” Charles B. Wang Center, Stony Brook University, through June 12. Information: www.stonybrook.edu/sb/deadlymedicine.