Nazi Doctors Research Articles

Les termes éponymes en médecine à l’épreuve du temps : qu’en reste-t-il dans le programme des études médicales en France ?

The eponymous terms are anchored in the medical language and in the daily practice. Nevertheless, for several years their use has been controversial, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended that they no longer be used in order to clarify the classification of diseases, and certain societies have abandoned eponymous terms referring to Nazi doctors. The future of their use depends on the education of new generations of medical students. We asked ourselves the following research question: what eponymous terms are still present in the french official graduate medical curriculum in 2021? The main objective was to establish a list of eponymous terms in order to provide the medical community with a database for historical research.We analyzed 35 repositories from different university teaching colleges. The total number of eponymous terms we referenced was 1122. The average number of eponymous terms per item was 6.7. Out of 939 eponymous nouns designating people, 898 were male (or 95.5%) and 40 were female (or 4.5%). The majority of the proper nouns referring to people (87%) referred to a physician or surgeon. The top four countries represented were the United States, France, Germany, and England. The 19th and 20th centuries had the highest number of proper names.Our study shows that in 2021, eponymous terms still occupy an important place in the training of new generations of medical students.

In Judgment of Unit 731: A Comparative Study of Medical War Crimes Trials after World War ii

Abstract The prosecution of the crimes of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731 are often compared to the prosecution of the crimes of the Nazi doctors. These comparisons emphasize immunity for the Japanese, whereas the Nazis were prosecuted for their actions. However, this comparison is an inaccurate one. While both trials look similar on the surface, their composition, scope, and framework were different. Conscious of the fact they were establishing international criminal precedent, the United States’ case against the Nazi doctors relied on military chain of command to prove strong legal responsibility for human experimentation crimes. In contrast, the United States avoided prosecuting Unit 731 because they could not replicate the same clear legal framework used to successfully prosecute the Nazis. The Soviet Union recognized the strategic implications of the United States’ decision not to try Unit 731 and saw an opportunity to strike a moral blow, not only by convicting Japanese military members at the Khabarovsk Trial, but also by immediately publishing the court’s proceedings internationally. Rather than focusing on the morality of who was punished by whom, understanding the military structures as identified through these different court proceedings could enable prevention of crimes against humanity.

A Critique of Principlism

A Critique of Principlism

The Margin of Moral Duty of Human Being to Participate in Biomedical Research

The existing paradigm of biomedical research ethics, based on respecting the free and informed consent of the research participant, originates from the famous Nuremberg Trial (1947), where the Nazi doctors were convicted of killing and torturing prisoners using medical experiments in German Concentration Camps during World War II. Since the second half of the 20th century, several international instruments have been developed to protect the rights of persons involved in research, considering the voluntariness of participation. Nevertheless, scientific community started to discuss the moral basis of mandatory human participation in biomedical research. Even today, some scholars argue that biomedical research creates public goods in the form of health, safety, and knowledge enjoyed almost by all members of society. The moral duty to participate in research is due to the need for public participation in producing public goods. Others suggest that human beings have a moral obligation to take some risks to help others. So, the moral duty to participate in biomedical research relies on the principles of justice, beneficence, etc. Considering the importance of this issue for research ethics, this article discusses the doctrines and theories, including public goods, free-riding, and beneficence, to set the margin of the moral duty of human beings to participate in biomedical research.

Nazi doctors: Response to Prof. Roelcke.

No conflicts of interest.

An Allegory of the Impossible <i>Time’s Arrow</i> Through the Lens of Unnatural Narratology

The literary representations of the Holocaust are full of critical and creative taboos. While Holocaust survivors such as Primo Levi were producing insightful and touching memoirs of their unfortunate experiences, non-survivors such as Martin Amis were also participating in the imaginative understanding of the nature of Holocaust offense. Academic interests in representations of Holocaust are also thriving. Among them the Perpetrator Studies, a field in response to the WWII and Holocaust, is the most controversial. Focusing on the perpetrators of mass atrocity, this field has developed into an interdisciplinary field. Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow was a literary reenactment of a Nazi doctor’s experience during the WWII which had caused great controversy in the studies of Holocaust literature. In this article, it is examined how Martin Amis’s <i>Time’s Arrow</i> problematizes those taboos in a very unique way. By adopting techniques of unnatural narratology to narrativize the perspective of a Nazi doctor, Martin Amis creates a postmodern writerly text to allegorize the inexplicable nature of Holocaust. The complex and perplexing reading experience generated by the difficult text not only increase reader’s investment in the novel but also in a subtle way ask them to bear witness to the Holocaust in this immersive act of reading. In this way, Martin Amis activates the performative power of literature and fulfills his duty as a moral witness to the genocide.

The Double-Headed Arrow of Trauma: The Morally Traumatised Perpetrator in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow

Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) gave rise to much controversy when it came out, for this novella revolves around a traumatised Nazi doctor exiled in the US whose life is narrated in a disorienting reverse chronology by what would seem to be his own dissociated conscience. Despite the abundant academic publications on this experimental narrative, such as those that read it as a posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) piece of fiction, the origin of the protagonist’s damaged psyche and the diverse symptoms he suffers from have not yet been explored from the viewpoint of perpetrator trauma, a moral-related syndrome distinct from PTSD that affects victimisers haunted by remorse. Drawing on trauma theory and the recently developed concepts of perpetration-induced traumatic stress (PITS) and moral injury, this article aims to contribute to the scholarly conversation on Amis’s novella by arguing that its narrative voice, backwards temporality, intertextuality and recurrent motifs perform the perpetrator/protagonist’s moral-based trauma provoked by an acute sense of shameful guilt and the fear of being discovered. The article concludes by suggesting that, through this staggering work, Amis gives readers not only an opportunity to actively remember and reflect on the Nazi genocide but also an insight into trauma from an unusual but necessary perspective.

Mengele's suitcase

On January 9, 2014, I received a call at my home in the small town of Alfeld (Leine), Central Germany. On the phone was Barbara Riepl, an acquaintance from Munich, and she had a truly exciting story waiting for me.11This story has been described in great detail in my book “Mengels Koffer. Eine Spurensuche” (Osburg Verlag, Hamburg, 2019) as well as in the documentary “Abgezockt! Die Auschwitz-Tagebücher”, which was broadcast on the German TV channel ZDFinfo Doku on the December 3, 2020. The grandfather of her best friend Nicole had been a prominent Hungarian Jew who had been deported to Auschwitz during World War II. There, he became a prisoner doctor forced to assist the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in his infamous human experiments. Several years after the war, he deposited a slew of documents in a Swiss safe. That safe had remained untouched for decades, but it was to be unsealed soon. Riepl went on to claim that her friend had entrusted her personally with these documents and asked if I, as a historian, would be interested in examining the documents and—if need arose—help to publish them.

Необходимо ли избавиться от эпонимов врачей-нацистов?

Hippocrates said: «Whoever succeeds in the sciences and lags behind in morality is more harmful than useful». The activities of doctors are a feat, a great sacrifice. This became especially evident now, during a new coronavirus infection, when doctors, saving the lives of others, died in line of duty. However, in the history of medicine there were also monster doctors who committed terrible acts to people. For example, during the World War II, Japanese doctors in Unit 731 became notorious (their names are known in politics, but they did not enter the history of medicine), as well as a Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, nicknamed Angel of Death. There also were doctors who were both scientists and ruthless killers. Among them are the German doctors who, having made a great contribution to medicine, in wartime became adherents of Nazi ideology and made brutal experiments on people (their names are preserved in medicine as eponyms of diseases discovered by them). The article outlines the historical facts of wartime medical and scientific activity, as well as our opinion on the still open question: should the diseases bear the eponyms of Nazi doctors, whose names have been preserved in history as «scientists» who lost their human appearance?

“In the Name of Humanity”: Nazi Doctors and Human Experiments in German Concentration Camps

Abstract During the Second World War over two hundred and fifty German doctors conducted medical experiments on human beings. Jurists and scholars have pondered ever since how doctors educated to heal could harm and even kill. Robert Jay Lifton has argued that psychological “doubling” could explain their crimes: their Faustian bargain with Nazism outweighed their Hippocratic Oath. Here the author argues, however, that Lifton’s theory does not apply to these Nazi doctors because there is no indication that they recognized ethical constraints against human experimentation. To explain how “healers became killers,” the author focuses on the broader historical aspects of their behavior.

Offline: Holocaust education—a medical imperative

As school students in England in the 1970s, we were taught the bare facts of the Holocaust. And that is where we left it. A fact of history, a fact certainly to be remembered, yet a fact that seemed very distant from contemporary times. But last week, the Ontario Medical Association, together with Doctors Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, held a webinar to discuss the case for teaching the Holocaust in medical schools. The meeting was led by Dr Frank Sommers, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Born in Budapest in 1943, Dr Sommers' extended family died in Nazi concentration camps. The webinar also heard evidence from bioethicist Dr Sheena Eagan and Professor Sheldon Rubenfeld, founder of the Center for Medicine after the Holocaust. Here are five reasons why the Holocaust should be considered a core subject for medicine today. First, doctors were centrally complicit in the Holocaust. Their collusion was such an extreme perversion of a physician's professional ethics that this very fact must be part of the repertoire of knowledge for every prospective doctor. Medicine drove the incremental advance towards genocide. The idea of life unworthy of life. Compulsory sterilisation. The euthanasia programme. And eventually genocide itself. A killing project led by doctors. Second, out of the Holocaust came the ethical foundation for medical research today—the Nuremberg Code. The Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg, beginning on Dec 9, 1946, lasted 130 days. 20 doctors and three bureaucrats. Experiments of torture, atrocity, and murder. The goal: to find methods to produce death, not healing. The Nuremberg Code was an integral part of the final legal judgment. The nature of human experimentation was at the heart of the trial. For the first time, the Nuremberg Code set out the principles of research ethics. The Nuremberg Code defines fundamental human rights for all research participants. One cannot begin to understand the moral basis of medical research in the 21st century without understanding the Nuremberg Code. And one cannot understand the Nuremberg Code without understanding the Holocaust. Third, teaching the Holocaust provides an opportunity for medicine to play its part in fighting anti-Semitism. Racism, including anti-Jewish hatred, is a public health issue. Teaching the Holocaust would be a significant act of resistance by the medical profession. Fourth, including the Holocaust in the medical curriculum would provide an opportunity to reflect on the role of the doctor in society. The idea of medical professionalism is based on a moral contract between the doctor and the individual patient in society. But for Nazi doctors during the Holocaust, individuals had no meaning whatsoever. The underlying idea of Nazism was that society was an organic entity where the individual was subordinated to the body politic. The doctor's duty was to serve the body politic, not the individual. Teaching the Holocaust would be a starting point for reflecting on the meaning of science, service, and human dignity in medicine—indeed, the very meaning of a profession. Finally, teaching the Holocaust would emphasise two vital principles in medicine. First, that the value of every human life is infinite. Second, our shared fate. As Robert J Lifton has argued, “We have a sense of kinship with every other self on the planet because we recognise that we all may go down together if we don't pull together to survive.” Genocide. The climate crisis. Nuclear war. COVID-19. These are the shared threats we face together. Teaching the Holocaust would foster that sense of kinship. In Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, Miklós Nyiszli wrote that “it was absolutely necessary to forget...if we wanted to keep from going mad”. An understandable sentiment. By contrast, the philosopher Avishai Margalit has proposed the notion of an ethics of memory. In his book of the same name, Margalit asks whether there is an obligation to remember. And if so, what is the nature of that obligation? He distinguishes between common memory—the aggregate of individual memories—and shared memory, a community of memory that demands action. “Even the project of remembering the gloomiest of memories is a hopeful project”, Margalit wrote. And, “a proper community of memory may help shape a nation”. Teaching the Holocaust in medicine might possibly do much more. It might just be a contribution to protecting all the peoples of the world from atrocities impossible to imagine.

Horror, Experimentation and Enhanced Interrogation

ABSTRACT After 9/11 the United States launched a global War on Terror. As part of this War, U.S. psychologists, supported by doctors, designed an ‘Enhanced Interrogation’, or torture, programme to extract information from detainees in their custody. The Enhanced Interrogation programme caused huge international controversy, including for the various health professional groups who became bound up in it. Little research has been conducted on how nonprofessional audiences reacted to and made sense of Enhanced Interrogation. This study therefore examines how members of an internet community understood the Enhanced Interrogation programme, and the actions of the health professionals who designed and supported it. The article is based on an analysis of postings from seven major threads from this forum. These postings were made in the year following the release of a major investigation into the Enhanced Interrogation programme’s inner workings. The article argues that the main lens through which people on this forum made sense of Enhanced Interrogation is horror. Individuals connected this horror very strongly to the horror of unethical human experimentation, and particularly to the destructive research of the Nazi doctors.

Visiting Holocaust: Related Sites in Germany with Medical Students as an Aid to Teaching Medical Ethics and Human Rights

Some doctors and nurses played a key role in Nazism. They were responsible for the sterilization and murder of people with disabilities. Nazi doctors used concentration camp inmates as guinea pigs in medical experiments that had military or racial objectives. What we have learnt about the behaviour of doctors and nurses during the Nazi period enables us to reflect on several issues in present-day medicine (research limitations, decision making at the beginning and the end of a life and the relationship between physicians and the State). In some authors' opinions, the teaching of the medical aspects of the Holocaust could be a new model for education relating to professionalism, Human Rights, Bioethics and the respect of diversity. Teaching Medicine and the Holocaust could be a way of informing doctors and nurses of violations of Ethics in the past. Moreover, a Study Trip to Holocaust and Medicine related sites has a strong pedagogical value. Visiting Holocaust related sites, T4 centres and the places where medical experiments were carried out, has a special meaning for medical students. Additionally, tolerance, anti-discrimination, and the value of human life can be both taught and learned through this curriculum. The following article recounts our experiences of organizing and supervising a study trip with a group of medical students to some Holocaust and medicine-related sites in Berlin and Hadamar (Germany). The study tour included lectures at universities in Düsseldorf and Berlin.

Autonomy and Responsibility of the Researcher in Research on Human Subjects

When discussing the issues of human relations and behaviour in society, I visualize a society that is guided by rules or rules, which, once violated, trigger the legal responsibility of the individual. In addition, there are moral concepts that are not related to the law, for example ethics, which deals with the study of moral principles. The topic of this article addresses the autonomy and responsibility of the researcher in research on human subject, starting from historical cases in the ethics development – Code or Tuskegee Study. An important aspect to know about research on human subjects is the Nuremberg Code, which raised the issue of the extraordinary abuses of Nazi doctors who were doing experiments on prisoners, without their will. These scientific experiments were called crimes against humanity and were tried at the Tribune. Consequently, for good moral conduct, this code was adopted, which introduced consent, the right of the person to withdraw without being sanctioned regardless of the time of the experiment and the risk-benefit analysis. Therefore, the rules that are in force today regarding research on human subjects reflect the reaction of an international community on those immoral medical experiments.

Lessons from the Holocaust for perinatal care today.

Lessons from the Holocaust for perinatal care today.

White coat, white alb, white mic: Institutions of truth in America in American Horror Story: Asylum

Abstract When Lana Winters of American Horror Story: Asylum releases footage of inhumane conditions at Briarcliff, she does so without the consent of those depicted. Her reliance on the suffering at Briarcliff to forward her own goals echoes two other key figures in Asylum: Dr Arden and Monsignor Howard. Arden’s advocacy of medical science and its potential to save humanity seem in sharp contrast to his horrific experimentation on what he sees as bare, wasted life. His position as fictional character with past experience as a Nazi doctor grounds his actions in a nexus of hyperreality and banality. Monsignor Howard believes himself a paragon of the church, whose obsessive ambitions towards Rome contrast his murderous, lustful and corrupt behaviours. He is not only complicit in Arden’s experimentation, but he takes life himself; yet, as he moves to New York as Cardinal, he looks past those abominations to focus on the greater good of the institution. In an echo of that wilful blindness, Lana is capable of looking away from the suffering of the very people she takes as an object. What makes Lana ever so slightly different from the others is her movement through the category of bare life (Agamben 1995: various) and her subsequent refusal of a ‘futurism that’s always purchased at [the] expense’ of the marginal (Edelman 2005: 4). The social institutions that the characters operate within allow and encourage their sociopathy (Asma 2009: 244–45). The danger of the institution is its capacity for creating and concealing monstrosity.

Comment peut-on expliquer les crimes des médecins nazis à Auschwitz ?

The Nazi doctors committed crimes in the camp of Auschwitz which constitute the darkest page in the history of medicine of the twentieth century. They were largely directly involved in the murder of the 1.1million Jewish majority and about 21,000gypsies who were transported from all over Europe. How can we explain the intellectual journey of those men who had embraced the medical career to relieve their neighbors? How could these cultivated and refined men, from the most prestigious faculties of medicine, have been able to achieve activitiesethically unacceptable? Eight factors help to explain the crimes committed by these educated and cultivated SS doctors: indoctrination fervent to Nazism, adherence to racial hygiene, a false sense of participation in a "public health enterprise", virulent anti-Semitism, unreserved obedience to orders, the opportunity to avoid the danger of fighting areas, the ambition to carry out medical research and the desire to improve surgical knowledge.

The soul in Time’s Arrow: A post-Enlightenment presence

The consensus among critics is that the narrator of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow is the suppressed moral consciousness of the protagonist, the Nazi doctor Odilo Unverdorben. This critical opinion takes its cue from the notion of ‘doubling’ in Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors which Amis cites as the spur to writing the novella. Although this reading is persuasive, it does not quite account for the full characterization of the narrator, namely his ‘soul-like’ qualities. This article makes the case for the narrator as a ‘familiar compound ghost’ of Western philosophical and cultural accounts of the soul. Such a reading has wide implications for the novella’s account of the work of the Nazi doctors and Nazism more generally, and positions the novella within an anti-positivist line of post-Enlightenment thought.

Girls and Dolls: The Biopolitics of Gender and Race in Lucía Puenzo's Wakolda

Girls and DollsThe Biopolitics of Gender and Race in Lucía Puenzo's Wakolda Erin K. Hogan introduction In her novel and film Wakolda 2013), Argentine writer- director Lucía Puenzo employs a transnational perspective to explore the discipline, racial hygiene, and biopower of two nation-building projects. Puenzo's tale, set in Patagonia in 1960, alludes to the indigenous targets of Argentina's Conquest of the Desert and the children and mother marks of Germany's National Socialism. These populations coincide in the narration of a German-Argentine family's travel along the desert road to reopen their boarding house in Bariloche, where an enclave of Nazi sympathizers resides. Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele's (Alex Brendemühl) treatment of the underdeveloped child protagonist and her mestiza doll, Wakolda, demonstrates Nazism's biopolitics, per Michel Foucault, and the immunitary dispositifs of thanatopolitics, per Roberto Esposito. By virtue of these interventions, Puenzo proposes a parallel of aggression towards two populations: the non-Aryan child and the non-European Mapuche. Drawing upon Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and the German legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842), Puenzo reveals how the fugitive is able to seduce the child protagonist, Lilith (Florencia Bado), and her family into cooperation with his experiments. Puenzo's critically acclaimed works are transnational in their narrative, production, and distribution. In 2013, Puenzo adapted and directed her own novel Wakolda to the big screen. The film won ten Argentine Academy of Arts and Sciences awards, including Best Film and Best Director. The feature was awarded Silver Condors from the Argentinian Film Critics Association in the aforementioned categories with the addition of Best Adapted Screenplay. Her novel has been translated into four languages (English, French, German, and Hungarian) and her film has been distributed around the world. Puenzo's family-owned company produced El médico alemán in collaboration with production companies from Argentina as well as from France, Germany, Norway, and Spain. I will continue to refer to the novel as Wakolda while I discuss the film as El médico alemán (2013; The German Doctor), the name by which it was distributed outside Latin America.1 This nomenclature, besides serving to distinguish between [End Page 246] the two cultural products, allows me to emphasize a key difference in the two texts: the novel comparatively explores Argentina's indigenous backstory while the film focuses on the German doctor. The literary work is divided into two parts, which are named after Lilith's two dolls: Herlitzka, during which her family travels through the desert and stays with a Mapuche family, and Wakolda, which transpires in Bariloche. Puenzo significantly abbreviates the novel's first part, Herlitzka, for the screenplay. Gender, sexuality, and medical intervention are common themes in two of Puenzo's three feature films, most notably XXY (2007) and El médico alemán 2013). In her most recent feature-length film, Puenzo returns to the crime thriller, which she pursued in El niño pez (2009; The Fish Child). Her films explore issues of identity and are set in Argentina; nevertheless, Puenzo's themes and genre conventions have proven very popular with international art film audiences. Deborah Shaw's observation of XXY is again true of El médico alemán: "There is a close relationship between local/intimate/subjective spaces and transnational production and exhibition, which points to the foreign audiences' desires to look inside the homes and hearts of the Latin American protagonists" (169). Thus, I see that Puenzo's cinematic glocality this time utilizes the Nazi thriller to explore Argentine genocides while addressing an international audience.2 I wish to illuminate how this transnational perspective on the Nazi doctor's exile in Argentina points at local history. My discussion will dialogue with Michel Foucault's theorization of biopower, which names Nazism as its clearest example, and Roberto Esposito's thanatopolitics to examine the intersection of the child, gender, and race in Lucía Puenzo's novel and film. Both biopower and thanatopolitics illuminate the state's control over the life and death of its subjects and its prejudicial intervention in their biological life, killing in order to allow others to live, as...

From The Invisible Thread

from The Invisible Thread Rick Hilles (bio) As I write this, a team of Egyptologistsseems on the brink of unearthing Nefertiti'stomb (behind the far wall of Tutankhamun's,allegedly) and the less ancient but no less vexing disappearance: Peter the Great'sAmber Room (which vanished in the last daysof The Third Reich) seems ready to reappear,though it will be weeks, months, before we know what the Polish vault contains; among that era'sunsolved mysteries is one I've tried to solve for years,the question arising like a serpent's head from a story told by a Shoah survivor, my childhood physician,who somehow withstood seven concentration camps*to tell this story, written down nowhere else but here: where I begin. But how to take you backinside that time? My small town, Ohio,where just an hour away, in Seven Hills,retired Ford mechanic John Demjanjuk— [End Page 105] found guilty of being "Ivan the Terrible,"the notorious Nazi guard of Treblinka,a verdict overturned on evidence withheld—that summer, new charges are filed against him. Reading Robert Jay Lifton's two-decade studyThe Nazi Doctors, which tells how SS doctorsmade underling physicians complicit in atrocities, forcing them to finger prisoners "unfit for work."As the man I'd not seen in two decades revealed:"You learned to say—what wasn't a death sentence!" When asked how long an inmate needed to recover—even from a broken limb—he'd say: "Two weeks."Anything more meant one-way to blue-black smoke!The retired physician had been a kind of tutelary spirit of our home through my childhood and adolescence.Mom loved to tell the story—we always asked her totell it again—of bringing me, in my terrible twos,with my then infant brother. (She couldn't get a sitter!) And how, when he was done examining me, he said:"Well, since the baby's here, I'll take a look at him!"He opened our blue-eyed boy's near constant grin only to discover "an ulcerated case of strep throat—fatal in one so young." Mom, horrified, said: "The babyhasn't cried—or given any clue"—a Stoic even then. Then he gave Mom a choice: she could take the babyto the hospital, or she could keep him at homeand bring him in to see the good doctor every dayand he'd administer the remedy to the baby himself. [End Page 106] "And eef anythingk happen—Day or thee Night—you cole mee, I put on my Pants & thee Shoozeand I come right over to thee house, immediately!"Almost as soon as the good doctor's words vaulted his lips, he became our presiding household spirit.But now, seeing him over three decades later,our shadows lengthening on his walls, behind us the light of sunset hitting the big picture window,turning the white walls red-orange, our faces flushed,I wondered: Might other, darker truths now surface? Reading Nazi Doctors, my eyes lit on one source—a Jewish physician—quoted only as "Tadeusz S"—could this possibly be our good doctor, I'd wondered?"Yes!" he cried, "that's me!" but there were statements attributed to him, he said, "that weren't quite right."(I'll have to leave these corrections for another time.)Then he spoke of SS holding batons over windpipes."There was no saying no—or you'd get the next bullet!" But how to tell you of this next rumbling fault lineI stood on in his company—the now octogenariangeneral practitioner who'd retired mere months after prescribing for Mom's recurring migraines a medicine"contraindicated" by her psychotropic trove of meds,*which landed her in a psych ward. Then a coma. [End Page 107] My first semester of grad school, studying English,of all the classes, I chose to drop Modern Poetry.(We'd barely begun to scale the walls of Roethke.)I'd then learn of a woman, the mental hospital's near lifelong resident, a ward of Massillon State,who only a week or so before had decked Momwhen...