Nazi Medicine-Part 2: The Downfall of a Profession and Pernkopf's Anatomy Atlas.

The immoral and criminal musculoskeletal experiments the Nazi regime conducted at the Ravensbrück concentration camp [7, 12] victimized approximately 80 women and 20 men, killing no fewer than 23 of them. These senseless experiments yielded no scientifically valuable data and were unusable both because of moral concerns and egregious scientific deficiencies [7]. But Nazi physicians did make other biomedical research contributions [18, 21, 35] during and after the World War II. What should be done with this material? Can we justify its continued use? In this essay, the second of two parts, I explore one example of this dilemma, Eduard Pernkopf’s Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy [6, 18, 20, 28, 41]. Any use of knowledge derived from criminally conducted Nazi biomedical research has generally brought with it condemnation from the medical community [11, 22, 33-36] because using such data corrupts the institution of medicine itself. Indeed, the crimes committed under the Nazi regime in the name of medicine and science continue to haunt the biomedical community. Medical eponyms associated with Nazi physicians who took part in human experimentation have fallen out of favor; Reiter’s syndrome, named after Hans Reiter, a German physician convicted of war crimes for his medical experiments at the Buchenwald concentration camp [35], is now designated reactive arthritis. More recently, concerns have been raised about Hans Asperger, whose name has been synonymous with autism; it appears he was not a principled opponent of German national socialism as once was believed [11]. At least one prominent historian of the time has recommended that Asperger not be honored by having his work credited eponymously [32]. Less subtle and perhaps more important is the question of what to do with Pernkopf’s atlas.