Historian Richard Weikart’s just-released book, Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing (Discovery Institute Press 2024) discusses the growing power of the right-to-die movement: “the urge to help people kill themselves has intensified, even to the point of pushing the reluctant towards death.”

Unnatural Death seems to be doing well at Amazon for a first week, which is no surprise, considering that we recently learned that at least 60 people have been euthanized due to eating disorders. Evolution News asks,

How did our culture reach this dark place? In a wide-ranging history of euthanasia and assisted suicide, historian Richard Weikart takes us from the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans to the contemporary scene — where the urge to help people kill themselves has intensified, even to the point of pushing the reluctant towards death. Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing, out today from Discovery Institute Press, answers this question by tracing a complex and fascinating history of ideas, attitudes, and legal wrangling stretching from Socrates to Peter Singer and beyond. Along the way Weikart shows diverse thinkers wrestling with the tension between the unalienable preciousness of human life and the longing to escape suffering and despair.

“How Did We Get Here? New Book by Richard Weikart Tracks Rise of the Culture of Death,” Evolution News, August 5, 2024

When the Culture of Death came for people with dementia…

Weikart is an expert in the Nazi period of German history where the euthanasia program was very well developed. But, of course, it ended there, for a time, when Germany lost World War II. A little-known aspect of that era was the use of people who suffered from mental illnesses or dementias in lethal experiments.

Last month we ran a podcast, “Caring for the Deeply Forgetful,” where memory care expert Stephen Post discusses dementia issues with Stonybrook neurosurgeon Michael Egnor (July 25, 2024, 1:15:33 duration). Post recounts some uplifting anecdotes but also reveals this darker history. Here are the relevant excerpts from the transcript:

Dr. Post begins by pointing out that if we assume that the mind is simply the activities of the brain, we will think that “when the brain goes, the mind goes and all self-identity is gone”:

And of course, I can talk about what happened to these individuals in Nazi, Germany when they were defined as life unworthy of life, as useless eaters and so forth. And many of them did wind up being killed in the hypothermia experiments.

The hypothermia experiments?

” Now, if you take that view, then you’re right back to 1939 in Munich, when they took 70,000 individuals out of asylums, about half of them… had dementia, senile dementia. They didn’t use the word Alzheimer’s at the time, and about half of them were cognitively mentally disabled. And they felt that these individuals had absolutely no moral value. They were not members of the human family. There was nothing there to be concerned about.

So they put them out at night in small groups to lie down in the cold snow. They would pack them in ice, they would leave them in freezing water for hours. Until then, they would bring them back into the asylum and they would warm them up at different temperatures in different mediums, sometimes water, sometimes hot air blowing on them.

And this of course, this is the T4 project, the Tiergartenstrasse 4 project, and the German scientists said they were doing this because they wanted to know, at what point would it really become totally futile to send rescue teams into the cold waters of the North Atlantic for downed submarines or whatever.

Of course, that was hideous and no justification for anything like that. But at any rate, after a year and a half, the Germans, people themselves reacted to this because these people who were deeply forgetful, they weren’t of the typically discriminated against groups. They weren’t Jews, they weren’t Polish Catholics, they weren’t gays or whatever. And they were, if you will, perfectly blue-blooded Aryans. And so the German people reacted against this.

So what happened then?

And the same two principal investigators who handled the Tiergartenstrasse 4 project went right to the death camps of Dachau and also Auschwitz, and they began perpetrating or inflicting the hypothermia research on these different discriminated against populations. So I think it’s always worth remembering that medicine got to its lowest point ethically ever. We’re talking about the annihilation of people simply because they’re having problems with their memory. They were annihilated first among individuals with these cognitive disabilities, what we might call their being differently abled nowadays.

– From the Transcript of the podcast

Doctors Trial

A key element of the de-Nazification process following the end of World War II was the Doctors Trial, for offences that included these. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “After almost 140 days of proceedings, including the testimony of 85 witnesses and the submission of almost 1,500 documents, the American judges pronounced their verdict on August 20, 1947. Sixteen of the doctors were found guilty. Seven were sentenced to death. They were executed on June 2, 1948.”

The trial resulted in, among other things, the Nuremberg Code of research medical ethics.

It all started with deciding that some humans do not have a natural right to live.

You may also wish to read: Dementia: New insights in caring for deeply forgetful people Dr. Stephen Post, an expert in memory disorders, talks to neurosurgeon Michael Egnor about when and how people suddenly remember again. Dr. Post considers it implausible that “rementia,” the sudden, brief return of a personal identity, can be explained purely in material brain terms.