The First Set of Lectures

Our first lecture was in Bonn at the AIB offices. It was given to us by Jürgen Weiland, a homeopathologist who works in Bonn. His focus was on the history of homeopathy, but he also gave us a brief explanation of what homeopathy was.
The whole practice hinges on two ideas. The first is that a substance that produces a set of symptoms in a well person will cure the disease of an ill person that shows the same set of symptoms. The second is that the theraputic effect of a substance can be separated from the toxic effect through a special series of dilutions.
As far as the history goes, a German by the name of Samuel Hahnmann was the founder of homeopathy. He began as a physician, but was shocked by the harm that medicine would often cause his patients. He set out to find a form of medicine that would meet his ideal: one that would cure the patient at minimal discomfort. While I believe that what he settled on was a fantastic demonstration of the placebo effect, I still found this lecture to be very helpful in the sense that it forced me to think about what dreams and ideals ought to be chased after in medicine today.

The second lecture so far was given by Dr. Wasser, and was about the 'racial hygiene' practiced by the Nazis just before and during World War II. The official name of the program was Aktion T4 and was a systematic murdering (under the name of euthanasia) of any kind of invalid, but especially the mentally and physically retarded. Under this program, doctors were no longer expected to consider the health of the individual so much as they were to consider the health of the race. The unworthy had to be cut from the gene pool like a tumor from the body.
It was interesting to learn that many of the individuals involved in this program used their acquired experience for death camps a few years later. Some have even described Aktion T4 as a 'test run' for the Holocaust. Dr. Wasser also spent the first part of the lecture describing some of the intellectuals and their writings that led up to Aktion T4 in Nazi Germany. I was amazed to hear that some of these men were great intellectuals of their day who had very scientific and rational explanations for their views. One of the few hospital directors that refused to permit euthanisation remarked, as best as I can remember, that God would not permit him to do so.