Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Medicine in Theresienstadt

2018; Oxford University Press; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/shm/hky066

1477-4666

Anna Hájková,

Communism, Protests, Social Movements

Illness was a defining experience for prisoners of Nazi concentration camps and ghettos, and yet their medical history is missing; a startling lacuna, given the extensive research into medicine and the Holocaust. This article studies the medical staff, patients and diseases in the Theresienstadt ghetto. In examining medical care in extremis, it studies how the Central European Jewish doctors succeeded in providing comparably excellent health care for the inmates. The article studies the mentality, experience and the gendered power mechanisms that characterised the medical staff, the agency of the doctors as well as the hierarchies they assigned to patients. Finally, in exploring how the prisoner physicians made sense of Theresienstadt as a part of their medical career, I show what kind of historical protagonists are doctors.