No Exceptions, no excuses: A testimonial

Abstract

This chapter offers a testimonial of the personal impact from participation in the Center of Medicine after the Holocaust (CMATH) meeting in Houston in 2012. As a non-scholar in medical ethics and not being a historian by training or scholarly practice, my perspective of the Shoah was certainly very limited. The meeting helped me recognize the profound implications of the behavior of National Socialist physicians and bioscientists on current medical ethics, which was initiated by civilization’s response to the horrors of their human subjects research. Most importantly, the path to the Holocaust came into a clearer focus, and with it, the recognition of the multiple components of that path, which are still present in contemporary medicine and culture. I am now inclined to think that the future might well be scarier than the past, in view of the evolving sophistication of medical sciences and technologies, and the ease with which they can be camouflaged as progress, especially when unaccompanied by a maturation of our collective and individual souls. Because societal blindness may usher in unimaginable adverse consequences of unprecedented proportions, the call to ethical responsibility is now broader and more important than perhaps at any time in the past.