Exploring impact of learning about medicine’s role in the Holocaust and its current implications for military medical education: History-informed ethics and countering antisemitism in medicine

Inevitable ethical complexities in modern medicine are increasingly challenging within burgeoning technological advances and sociopolitical and economic pressures. Dual loyalties in military medicine raise additional quandaries. Curriculum is needed to foster humanism, ethical vigilance, and moral reasoning in conjunction with clinical competencies supporting morally resilient professional identity formation (PIF). Health humanities, including history in medical education, can cultivate self-awareness, professionalism, and critical reflection, promoting moral development. Learning about physicians’ and the medical/scientific establishment’s complicity in atrocities, including genocide, during Nazism and the Holocaust (N&H), and moral courage exemplars (Jewish health professionals in ghettos and concentration camps and “righteous of the nations”), supports history-informed morally resilient PIF and bioethics education with contemporary relevance for medical education/practice including as a bulwark against antisemitism. Outcomes research on such curricula implementation is scant. An educational intervention, i.e. seminar entitled “The Role of Medicine in the Holocaust and its Contemporary Relevance: Sustaining Our Moral Compass, Countering Antisemitism in Medicine,” was implemented for all second-year students within a military medical school’s bioethics course. This mixed methods study assessed reported seminar impact on professional ethical development of military medical students. The seminar was presented to 173 medical students within a longitudinal 18-month pre-clerkship Medical Ethics course. Pre- and post-seminar surveys included quantitative items and short answer narrative reflections. 123 student participants completed a pre-seminar survey; 86 completed a post-seminar survey (69.9% post-seminar response rate). Analyses were significant for reporting becoming knowledgeable about physicians’ role during N&H and those demonstrating moral courage. Themes acknowledged importance of understanding history for preventing recurrent atrocities, medicine’s legitimization of antisemitism, and moral responsibilities of physicians in future medical practice, especially military medicine. Results suggest learning and reflecting on personal relevance of history of medicine’s complicity in N&H can serve as a moral anchor and reflection vehicle when addressing contemporary challenges and dilemmas of medicine, military-specific medicine, and global citizenship. Results support the call for this history to be required in all health professions education (HPE) to promote morally responsible healthcare, research, public policy, and global citizenship, including eliminating antisemitism and all forms of discrimination in healthcare and HPE.