My wife died 3 years ago, and in accordance with her wishes, her body was donated to the Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine. I received telephone and written thanks for the donation of her body, and a year ago, I received her cremated ashes, again, with many thanks.
In contrast to my experience, historically, collecting bodies for scientific purposes at times transgressed into crimes and atrocities.1 The ethics of gaining knowledge from victims of atrocities was not questioned until 1997. It was then that persistent inquiries from New York oral surgeon Howard Israel and UBC graduate and University of Toronto Medical School Professor William Seidelman challenged Austrian authorities and the University of Vienna to admit that Nazi concentration camp victims’ bodies were used to create Pernkopf’s Atlas of Anatomy.1 For many years, the focus remained on Pernkopf’s atlas, with poor insight into the origins of other anatomical atlases from the Nazi period.
Recently, Professor Claudia Krebs and colleagues revealed that Pernkopf was not alone.2 Rudolph Spanner, a member of the Nazi Party and director of the Institute of Anatomy at the Medical Academy of Danzig, took over curating the 15th edition of Werner Spalteholz’s popular anatomy atlas after Spalteholz’s death in 1940. Krebs’ investigation confirmed that the anatomical images commissioned by Spanner were created between 1942 and 1945. Her team found that in many new illustrations there was evidence of data matching victims from various prisons and Gestapo executions. Among the additional victims identified as “linked to specific illustrations,” were children and adults from one of the psychiatric institutions infamous for their Nazi euthanasia program.
The main objective of Krebs’ project is to contribute to the identification of victims whose bodies were exploited for anatomical illustrations. The project is both a scholarly pursuit and a moral obligation to recognize those exploited by the Nazi regime, but it also has implications for current medical ethics in the use of bodies and images in anatomical research and education.
—George Szasz CM, MD
References
1. Yee A, Zubovic E, Yu J, et al. Ethical considerations in the use of Pernkopf’s Atlas of Anatomy: A surgical case study. Surgery 2019;165:860-867.
2. Krebs C, Schwab K, Kahlon M, et al. Correspondence. Pernkopf was not alone: The Nazi origins of the Spalteholz–Spanner atlas. Lancet. 30 October 2024. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(24)02314-6.
This post has not been peer reviewed by the BCMJ Editorial Board.
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