psychiatry during the nazi era ethical lessons for the modern professional精神病学在纳粹时代为现代职业道德课.pdf

Annals of General Psychiatry BioMed Central Review Open Access Psychiatry during the Nazi era: ethical lessons for the modern professional Rael D Strous* Address: Department of Psychiatry, Beer Yaakov Mental Health Center, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel Email: Rael D Strous* - raels@post.tau.ac.il * Corresponding author Published: 27 February 2007 Received: 2 December 2006 Accepted: 27 February 2007 Annals of General Psychiatry 2007, 6:8 doi:10.1186/1744-859X-6-8 This article is available from: /content/6/1/8 © 2007 Strous; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract For the first time in history, psychiatrists during the Nazi era sought to systematically exterminate their patients. However, little has been published from this dark period analyzing what may be learned for clinical and research psychiatry. At each stage in the murderous process lay a series of unethical and heinous practices, with many psychiatrists demonstrating a profound commitment to the atrocities, playing central, pivotal roles critical to the success of Nazi policy. Several misconceptions led to this misconduct, including allowing philosophical constructs to define clinical practice, focusing exclusively on p