the, uh, anatomy of an anatomy tome
don't want to step on Wisdom Weasel's toes with a piece of history on the weekend, but this bit isn't date specific and deals with fascism as opposed to communism, so i'll assume its different enough.
a couple weeks ago, a visiting friend saw the wife's copy of Gray's Anatomy on the shelf and made a comment regarding its possible origins in the atrocities of the Holocaust, with Jews being used as the (sometimes live) models for the drawings within. i thought it was interesting and potentially horrifying, so i decided to see what the internet might hold in the way of information, or at least wild speculation. from what I can find, Gray's Anatomy actually goes back to the 19th century and has been fairly strictly created by Brits and Americans with no apparent connection of it to the Holocaust. however, there is another anatomy book that does fit the bill, created in the 1940s by a Dr. Eduard Pernkopf of the University of Vienna, and in which some of the bodies used in its creation were almost certainly Jews who perished at the hands of Nazis. Pernkopf himself was a rabid Nazi. the story is pretty fascinating, as partially taken from this transcript of a radio show from 5 years ago:
Max Kamien: On October 1st 1998, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Vienna held a press conference to table a report about the origin of bodies used by Professor Eduard Pernkopf in the Department of Anatomy between 1938 and 1945 in the preparation of colour illustrations for his world famous anatomy atlas. The report documented a minimum of 1,377 bodies sent from the Gestapo execution chamber in Vienna to Pernkopf's Department of Anatomy and the exploitation of brains of children murdered at the Vienna psychiatric hospital.
The significance of this report is that it is the first time a German language university has publicly and widely acknowledged its role in the medical abuses of the Hitler regime.
What led this once prestigious university to confront this darkest chapter in its long history? It began with an oral surgeon in New York.
Before an operation, Dr Howard Israel often consulted his 1963 Pernkopf Anatomical Atlas. But it was only in 1995 that he learned of Pernkopf's Nazi past. Dr Israel went back to an earlier 1943 edition and was horrified to find the title page covered in swastikas and the double lightning bolt insignia of the SS. In the preface, Pernkopf attributes the production of the atlas to the 'happy conjunction of brilliant illustrators and the ready supply of bodies of executed criminals.'
Howard Israel wanted to know who were these 'executed criminals'. He contacted Bill Seidelman, a Professor of Family Medicine in Toronto, who, over the last decade, has upset the German medical establishment by revealing that many prestigious German medical schools were still using specimens obtained from Nazi victims in teaching their medical students. He also exposed the Nazi past of Dr Hans Sewering, who in 1992 was elected as President of the World Medical Association, the organisation set up after the Nuremberg doctors' trials in 1947 to be responsible for the ethical conduct of the world medical profession.
Previous experience in questioning German medical schools had taught Seidelman that they would not respond to individuals, especially Jewish ones. But they did respond to Jewish Holocaust organisations which were philosophically, politically and organisationally equipped to address and follow through with their inquiries. Israel and Seidelman sought help from the largest such organisation, the Israel Holocaust and Martyrs' Authority, Yad Vashem.
They had little trouble in obtaining biographical material about Eduard Pernkopf. He was born in 1888, graduated in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1912, became a lecturer in anatomy in 1921 and a full Professor and Head of the Institute of Anatomy in 1933. Four days after Hitler's troops marched into Austria on March 13th, 1938, he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Medicine. His first action was to purge the Faculty of the 173 Jewish staff, which was 53% of the Faculty. This included Nobel Prize winners and other still famous names in medicine. I was taught by one them, Dr Franz Lippay, who was an inspiring teacher of physiology at the University of Adelaide. They unearthed photos of Pernkopf's inaugural address as Dean to the Faculty at the University of Vienna, where the entire faculty is dressed in Nazi uniform. 'The duty of a doctor,' Pernkopf said, 'was not only in furthering the propagation of the fit, but also in eliminating the unfit and defective, by sterilisation and other means.'
Yad Vashem demanded an official investigation into who the anatomical subjects had been and how they died. The universal political process of denial followed and was only overcome by the threat of a boycott of all the medical publications of the publisher.
It turned out that only 8% of the 1,377 bodies assigned to the Department of Anatomy were Jewish. Most were Austrians, and their 'crimes' were disobedience towards the Nazi regime, the illegal slaughter of animals, listening to the BBC, or trading on the black market. Whatever their so-called crimes or their racial origins, these people were murdered and their bodies exploited by Professor Eduard Pernkopf.
Comments
I remember on a childhood visit to Dachau (our family holidays were always a lot historical and little bizarre) they had a display of horrendous photos of experiments conducted in the camps on livving and dead inmates.I didn't know about the contents of your post but it wasn't surprising given the industrialized nature of the Nazi murder regime . Thanks for sharing another chapter in what is an ongoing struggle both internally and externally in Europe: dealing with the pervasive nature of the fascist, communist, and imperialist legacies that permeate and poision societies.
Posted by: WisdomWeasel | March 14, 2005 09:48 AM
Hi - I Googled for Pernkopf's anatomy and this happened to pop up (I'm writing a paper on Nazi experimentation and it's amazing how many blog entries I've run into on the subject). Thanks for the bits of info - would you mind giving a few of the sources? Thanks again.
P.S. Wisdom Weasel, your family took you to Dachau? Hmm. I'll be visiting Poland in a few weeks, but that's with school and it's a strictly educational trip...never heard of anyone going for pleasure before (or isn't Dachau in Germany? Whatever). Yeah, there were a lot of experiments conducted there though.
Posted by: SmR | March 17, 2005 12:13 PM
Believe it or not, we lived in Germany when I was growing up and my parents also took us to what can only be described as unusual vacation destinations. i.e. Baden Baden
Posted by: the wife | March 17, 2005 02:24 PM
Dachau, the Somme battlefields of France, the Berlin Wall, The Menin Gate in Ypres (inscribed with the names of 1000s of never-found WW1 dead), Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" Barvarian retreat, the D Day beaches, Waterloo: we went on very military history-minded vacations. We also went to Paris, but my dad declared it "crap due to a lack of battles" (I paraphrase).
Posted by: wisdomweasel | March 24, 2005 04:36 PM