The Curious Case of Thalidomide and the Absent Eugenic Clause in Canada's Amended Abortion Law of 1969.

This essay traces the role of the drug thalidomide in the reform of Canadian abortion law during the late 1960s. Like elsewhere in the British Commonwealth, discussion of the "thalidomide disaster" of the early 1960s intensified leading up to the debates that culminated in the 1969 amendment to Canadian abortion law. Although thalidomide was a rallying point for advocates of eugenic abortion, a majority of Canadian MPs, unlike their British and Commonwealth counterparts, rejected this argument. Widespread public and political considerations of the thalidomide tragedy were thus unable to inspire support for a eugenic clause in Canada's new abortion law, in spite of the nation's infamous eugenic past.

A darker shade of green: medical botany, homeopathy, and cultural politics in interwar Germany.

In 1941 a proposal was made to Nazi SS Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler, that extracts of a South American plant, Dieffenbachia seguine, might be used for the mass sterilization of racially undesirable war prisoners. The proposal was based on published animal fertility research conducted by Dr Gerhard Madaus, co-founder of a firm that produced and marketed natural medicinals. His fertility experiments were part of a broader series aimed at evaluating the scientific validity of ethnobotanical folk-knowledge. This article traces the historical background to the Madaus research: first, the role of homeopathy in the introduction of Dieffenbachias to western medicine; secondly, the social context of German 'alternative' medicine in the interwar period; and finally, the role of Madaus himself, whose homeopathically-oriented research on botanical medicinals inadvertently initiated the chain of events described here.

[Inhuman practices in gynecology in national socialism and its victims. Study of concrete results]. / Uber inhumane Praktiken der Frauenheilkunde im Nationalsozialismus und ihre Opfer. Untersuchung zu konkreten Ereignissen.

In our opinion German gynaecology has failed to adequately face what came to pass during the Nazi period. This can be proved objectively, for there is no evidence that, after 1945, gynaecology had in any way cared to take notice--either thermatically or medically--of the thousands of victims of inhuman practices such as forced termination of pregnancy, compulsory sterilisation and the like. During the past 50 years recollections of enforced sterilisations, compulsory abortions, deliberate and hence criminal negligence and problematic approaches in research and teaching were almost completely banished from the area of conscious awareness and largely suppressed or silently ignored. Most of the medical directors of Departments of Gynaecology of German universities shared this view whenever they were questioned on the connections between gynaecology and Nazism. Now that two generations have passed it seems possible to examine and explore with less guilt feelings and shame the immensely fateful rôle of gynaecology in that context. Accent should be on the fate of the victims of that period. To bring back these events to memory, however, does not permit to conceal the part played by the physicians committing of these inhuman Nazi crimes. Data collected from a psychosomatically oriented examination of victims exemplify that to concretely recall gynaecology during Nazism a1-so offers a chance in several respects. One of the possibilities in this context is to signal "late apology" and regret to patients who had been victims, in one's own area of work, after one has psychically worked over their fate. Besides, a gynaecological-psychosomatic expertise will help e.g. that compulsorily sterilised women are granted financial aid that has at long last become a legal possibility and can be applied for since 1980. However, the relevant patient records do show very clearly that the inhuman practice of gynaecology during the so-called "Third Reich" was not only a collective problem but equally due to a failure of the individual conscience of numerous gynaecologists. Working over this complex may enhance our own sensitivity for psychosomatic and ethic problems and counteract any likelihood of a recurrence of an inhuman gynaecology.