Conference
Medical Review Auschwitz: Medicine Behind the Barbed Wire is an annual international conference designed to educate the world’s medical community about medical ethics and practice in the context of the Second World War. It deals with medical, psychological and social consequences of persecution by physicians and other medical personnel in the Nazi German concentration camps as well as heroic efforts to provide medical aid by imprisoned members of the medical profession. Historical accounts are also used to discuss ethical implications of Nazi medicine for contemporary medical practice.
Medicine Behind the Barbed Wire was organized for the first time in 2018 in Kraków, Poland. In 2022, the 4th edition featured the first Z.J. Ryn Award ceremony for unique contribution to the Medical Review Auschwitz project and for the best lecture at the conference. The 5th edition attracted over 100 hundred participants from around the world.
The conference is organized by the Polish Institute for Evidence Based Medicine in collaboration with the Kraków Medical Society, Institute of National Remembrance and Jagiellonian University Medical College. Conference partners include the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, University of Colorado Center for Bioethics and Humanities, Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and the International Chair in Bioethics (WMA Cooperation Center).
Target audience
Clinical practitioners of various specialties; members of ethical committees at medical institutions; medical educators working in bioethics, medical ethics and history of medicine programs; residents and fellows in training interested in the legacy of the Holocaust for clinical practice, professional ethics, physician-patient relationship and bioethics.
The conference is open to allied medical professionals, including psychotherapists and psychologists, nurses, midwives and paramedics. The program is also directed to students of medicine and related disciplines as well as ethicists, bioethicists and historians of medicine.
Learning objectives
The aim of Medical Review Auschwitz: Medicine Behind the Barbed Wire is to educate the world’s medical community about the medical ethics and practice in the context of the Second World War, placing special emphasis on the behavior of physicians and other medical professionals imprisoned in Nazi German concentration camps, prisons, ghettoes and other places of detainment. The conference discusses malpractice and ethical violations of medical personnel to demonstrate their implications for contemporary medical practice and health care policies.
By attending this event participants will be able to:
- Critically reflect about the prominent role of health professionals in Nazi eugenics, mass murder of the disabled, criminal medical experimentation on human subjects and the genocide during the Second World War.
- Identify the legacy of health professionals’ involvement in the Holocaust for contemporary thinking about genetics, beginning and end-of-life care, medical and economic policies as well as public health programs.
- Explore the cultural, social, economic and political factors that gave rise to the rise of thinking based in eugenics and racism that was sanctioned by health professionals and ultimately lead to genocide, and navigate similar factors in the modern world so that the basic codes of medical practice based in human rights are not overthrown in the future.
- Contemplate the ongoing clinical and ethical implications for the profession of medicine, patient care and research involving human participants.
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