AMA Journal of Ethics

One health professions school views the Holocaust as fundamental content knowledge in modern health care ethics, but teaching it is difficult.

The Nuremberg Code, the World Medical Association’s declarations of Geneva and Helsinki, and the Belmont Report share an origin in the Holocaust.

Dr Matthew Wynia joins us to discuss the importance and challenges of teaching Holocaust history to health professions students.

Sterilization requires physicians’ surgical skills. Forced sterilization requires many clinicians’ complicity.

Connections between racism and dehumanization have immediate, lethal, deleterious, longer-term consequences. Lessons from Nazi eugenics and human experimentation still apply.

For many physicians, lack of understanding about brain death leads to confusion and muddles interactions with patients’ loved ones at the end of life.

Criteria in statutes and tests used to diagnose brain death don’t always jibe, and this can undermine public trust in death pronouncements.

A patient’s transition from “living” to “dying” is not socially marked in the same way death is marked, and this is both clinically and ethically relevant.

Dr Ariane Lewis discusses how we can navigate uncertainty and ambiguity about brain death by understanding clinical criteria for brain death determination and how our approaches to death are culturally and socially situated.

Religious and cultural values can conflict with clinical standard practice and law.