Warning about current backslide of today's medical profession into dark days of Germany's euthanasia programme
By Hilary White
HULL, UK, April 9, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In Hitler's Germany, long before 1939, vulnerable patients in nursing homes, insane asylums and orphanages were being killed by medical practitioners, including nurses, in the Nazi eugenics programme Aktion T4 that some estimate killed as many as 200,000 to 250,000 people. Next week, Linda Shields, a professor of nursing at Hull University in Yorkshire, will give a speech on the issue.
Professor Shields will speak at the Royal College of Nursing's Annual Research conference on the implications today of the nursing profession's participation in the T4 programme.
"Nursing can't move on as a profession unless it addresses its black side," she has said.
Professor Shields is a member of the College of Experts at the Medical Research Council (UK), and chairman of the International Collaboration on the Role of Nursing in the Third Reich. Her interests also include the study of nurses who worked in the slave labour camps of Nazi Germany.
Shields told the Guardian, "I've seen horrified faces and some people crying when I've looked down from the stage at other conferences. And ...   more »