Summary Of Tyranny Of The Normal By Leslie Fielder

In the essay, “The Tyranny of the Normal,” Leslie Fielder briefly refers to the destruction of individual’s who differed from the preferred Norm in Nazi-occupied Germany. Under Hitler’s decrees during the Holocaust, individuals who were deemed ‘unworthy of living,’ including Roma and Sinti gypsies, the mentally ill and handicapped, Jehovah’s witnesses, homosexuals, freemasons, and Jews, were subject to mass murders, as well as unethical human experimentations. Nazi physicians’ experiments on innocent individuals was one of the factors that led to more strict regulations of human experimentation that are currently accepted and in use.
Human experimentation can be dated back to the middle ages, in 1025 C.E with the introduction of clinical trials,

Prisoners were forced to participate in cruel experiments without volunteering or giving informed consent. Furthermore, they were not allowed to leave the experiments. Most of the conducted experiments resulted in permanent disability, severe physical disfigurement, or death. At the Auschwitz concentration camp, Dr. Josef Mengele was involved with performing experiments which included placing subjects in pressure chambers, drug testing, freezing them to death, and a variety of other generally fatal traumas. Mengele was particularly interested in performing experiments on twins. There are several accounts in which Menegle abused the twin subjects of his experiments. He had sewn the twins together “back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Their parents…managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering” (Barenbaum 196). Most of Mengele’s experiments lacked scientific merit, including his endeavors to change eye color in children by injecting chemicals into their eyes, along with numerous amputations and surgeries. Once the experiments were over, the twins were usually murdered and meticulously dissected. Other experiments performed by Carl Vaernet attempted to “cure” homosexuality through various experiments on homosexual prisoners. Other

Under the classical version of the oath, it states “I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice…Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice…” Each current graduating medical student taking the modernized oath swears by the following: “I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism. I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.” This oath, however, was not widely adopted by the physicians associated with the Nazi Socialist party of Germany. Hippocrates himself, for whom the oath has been attributed to, had been betrayed. The Latin phrase to “First, do no harm,” did not serve as the central dogma of the Nazi doctors. The ethical principles stated in the Hippocratic Oath were intended to provide guidance in the increasingly difficult ethical decisions physicians will make throughout their professional