Date: Monday, March 23, 2015
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Room 217, Perkins Library
Contact: Rachel Ingold, rachel.ingold@duke.edu or (919)684-8549
Please join us on Monday, March 23, at 5:30 p.m. for our next Trent History of Medicine lecture. Sabine Hildebrandt, M.D., will present “The role of anatomists in the destruction of victims of National Socialism.”
The history of anatomy during the National Socialist (NS) period from 1933 to 1945 has only recently come under systematic investigation. A majority of German anatomists became members of the NS party, while other anatomists were persecuted for so-called “racial” or political reasons. The traditional legal sources for body procurement included increasing numbers of bodies of victims of the NS system. Anatomists used these bodies for teaching and research purposes, and thus played a decisive role in the NS regime’s intended utter annihilation of its perceived enemies. Current research is focused on the reconstruction of the victims’ identities and their dignified memorialization.
Dr. Hildebrandt is an assistant professor in the department of general pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and a lecturer on global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School. After medical studies at the University of Marburg, Germany, and a professional start in experimental rheumatology, she became an anatomical educator. In this capacity she worked at the University of Michigan Medical School from 2002 to 2013, and since then at Harvard Medical School. Her research interests are the history and ethics of anatomy, and specifically the history of anatomy in National Socialist Germany, a field in which she is an internationally recognized expert. She continues to develop her educational work, which integrates anatomy, medical history and medical ethics.
Please note that Dr. Hildebrandt will be giving a related lecture, “From the Dead to the Living: Ethical Transgressions in Anatomical Research in National Socialism” on Tuesday, March 24, 2015, at noon in Duke Hospital Lecture Hall 2002.
Both events are sponsored by the History of Medicine Collections and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Medical Humanities & History of Medicine.