Kim był Eduard Pernkopf i jaka jest prawda o jego atlasie anatomicznym?

Abstract

Eduard Pernkopf (1888-1955) was an Austrian professor of anatomy who later served as a dean of the medical school and rector of the University of Vienna. Pernkopf himself joined the Nazi Party’s foreign organization in 1933. He is best known for his seven-volume anatomical atlas Topographical Anatomy of Man (“Topographische Anatomie des Menschen, Lehrbuch und Atlas der regionar-stratigraphischen Praparation”) often colloquially known as the Pernkopf atlas or just “Pernkopf”. It is considered a scientific and artistic masterpiece. It has been in recent years found that Pernkopf and the artists working for him: Erich Lepier, Ludwig Schrott, Karl Endtresser and Franz Batke used executed political prisoners as their subjects. Using a special treatment of the paper used for watercolor they created the images that look like living tissue in print. But they also used the Nazi symbols in their work for the atlas. In 1995 Pernkopf and his atlas came into the focus of a controversy in scientific ethics following the publication of a paper by Professor Edzard Ernst revealed that the subject bodies may have in some cases been those of executed prisoners and children killed in a Viennese hospital. A year later Dr. Howard Israel discovered many of the Nazi symbols in the artists’ signatures. Since then physicians have discussed whether it is ethical to use the atlas. This resulted in the establishment of the Senatorial Project of the University of Vienna in 1997. As a result, the atlas’ publisher directed that an insert noting this possibility be mailed to all libraries holding the atlas, and stopped printing new copies.