Attacks Hitler As World Peril to Medicine

Following is an extract from the testimony of Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, emeritus professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, who appeared as a witness for the physicians in “The Case of Civilization Against Hitlerism” last night:

When invited by the organizers of the program for this meeting to speak as a representative of medical profession, I felt it my duty to accept and to voice my protest against the deplorable and indefensible injury done to medical men and to medicine under the Nazi regime in Germany; for the injury is not limited to Germany, but involves also the progress of medicine throughout the entire world to such a degree that it has become a matter of deep international concern.

To be compelled to criticize severely the unfair treatment of a large group of medical practitioners, medical teachers and medical investigators by those in authority in Germany makes me very sad, for I owe a great personal debt to German medicine.

No one in this country, perhaps, has had a greater appreciation of or a greater respect for the contributions of the Germans to the medical sciences than I. To one who knew medical Germany before 1914, it seems almost incredible that conditions such as exist today in that country could ever have developed. But I am compelled to face the facts as they are, and painful as it is, I am forced urgently to remonstrate against the frightful persecution to which a large number of medical men, some of them great men, in Germany have been subjected.

When medicine and medical men are badly injured in any highly developed country, the medicine of the whole world is sure also to suffer. And this is particularly true when a country like Germany, which for decades has held a very enviable position with regard to medical practice, medical teaching and medical research is overwhelmed by a cataclysm that greatly impairs its educational and investigative activities and results in grave deterioration of its medical work. The Great War in itself was undoubtedly catastrophic for German medicine.

Then came Hitlerism with its translation of the long latent anti-Semitism into violent action and its attempt to render its “non-Aryan” population impotent.

WORLD MEDICINE SUFFERS

Within a year after Hitler had become Chancellor, a most deplorable stroke had been inflicted upon German medicine with resultant harm also to the medicine of the rest of the world.

To understand Hitler and Hitlerism one is compelled to enter the domain of psychopathology, that is to say of the mentally abnormal.

What can be done in this appling situation? There must, of course, be large numbers of sensible Germans who are utterly opposed to what is going on but they dare not speak for fear of Nazi reprisals. Some of you may see remedial measures that are invisible to me. As a physician, I know of no effective anti-toxin for a psychic epidemic. Perhaps it must run its course until the emotional state of the German massed becomes more normal. Possible the repercussions in other lands will take the form of international intervention. Who knows?