No place for nazis in medicine

S

spuriousmonkey

Banned
Banned
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8194

A Nazi war criminal's contribution to medicine is being slowly written out of the medical record.
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In this case it was "Reifer's syndrome' which is now more and more called by the term 'reactive arthritis'.

Reifer described the syndrome in 1916. Later he turned into a fanatical nazi.

But he discovered it in 1916. He didn't discover it doing experiments on prisoners of concentration camps. Is this cleansing of history justified? Or just an overly eager example of political correctness?
 
spuriousmonkey said:
Is this cleansing of history justified?
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Anyone can "justify" anything! ...perhaps not to you, perhaps not to me, but neither makes it less "justified".

spuriousmonkey said:
Or just an overly eager example of political correctness?
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Yes, it's just another example of people trying to rewrite history so that it "sounds" better (to them!).

Baron Max
 
It's perfectly justified, this doctor performed many cruel experiments on prisoners. There is no reason to name something after anyone except to honor them, and he doesn't deserve it.
 
But he didn't do experiments on prisoners to describe the disease.

He did that already in 1916.

Edit: also why do we worship people like pasteur? According to our current ethical standards he crossed the line too many times. He would have been shoved in prison for the experiments he did on people. I many cases he was plain lucky not to kill them.

Should we write away anyone who did anything wrong in his life?
 
If you feel strongly about it, go and try. If enough people agree with you, it will change.
 
At first glance I was thinking they should have left the name alone.

Then I put in alot of other factors, such as a man of medicine, whos matra should be along the lines of "first do no harm" had willingly become a part of the "final solution" so to speak.

People can be stripped of many titles due to their actions, which may or may not have any relation to what they received the title for. Credit for discovery of an illness falls under being given a title.

And during this renaming process they are not assigning the name to credit another for discovery. I dont see where there is an effort to deny who discovered it, just an effort to rename the disease. Other diseases have been renamed in the past.

There is also a bit of controversy over who actually discovered the disease (but that argument is kinda thin in my opinion).

I do not foresee in the future, should Right to Die become an act, that it will be named the Kevorkian act for a similar reason.

.
 
it's all about politics :cool:
there will be another who will want to name that syndrom with his own name
 
...a group of doctors decided in 1977 to begin a campaign for their colleagues to abandon the term, and name the syndrome "reactive arthritis" instead.
 
Those scientists should be grateful for the results he obtained. Even the nasty experiments provide us with useful information. Those acts cannot be undone - so why waste the data?

Maybe he was a nice man before he started doing those dodgy few experiments!
 
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