Special screening held for ‘Healing by Killing’ film

“Healing by Killing,” a film by Nitzan Aviram, will be shown at a special screening from noon to 1:30 p.m. on Monday, March 30, in the Institute of Psychiatry Auditorium.

This documentary film has been critically acclaimed in Europe, and will have its commercial premiere in New York on April 22. It is being shown in selected U.S. medical schools prior to its opening. The message it contains is pertinent to all health care professionals; especially medical students and physicians.

The denial of the Hippocratic oath by German doctors was a crucial factor in creating the Nazi killing machine. As early as 1940, during a mercy killing operation (euthanasia), medical doctors and scientists had developed the first model of the gas chamber and crematorium. From planning and organizing through mass selections into actual killing, doctors misused their medical authority and provided a scientific legitimation for the Nazi killing machine. Without the initiative and cooperation of Nazi doctors, it is doubtful whether the death industry of the holocaust would have developed to the extent that it did.

In the film, Aviram reveals the ambivalent position of the physician in society as both healer and harbinger of death. It conveys a sense of moral outrage at the idea of doctors applying their own moral judgment concerning which lives are worth living. “The doctor is the gatekeeper between life and death, so people tend to ask him for advice, and he wields that kind of life and death authority,” said Aviram. “But the doctor should not be a philosopher. His job is to preserve life.”

For more information, call Sandra Campbell at 792-5278.

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