Human Kind?

An encounter with a Second World War veteran has Max Pemberton reflecting on his own humanity

Doctors are only human. And just as the course of human history is often a dark and ugly one, so medicine has a chequered past. I remember when I was 15 years old and studying for my history exams being horrified to read that, of all people in society, it was the doctors in Nazi Germany that first implemented mass murder. It was naive of me to think doctors should be different from anyone else. The eugenic and anti-Semitic ideas which culminated in the Holocaust received strong ideological and practical backing from doctors.