Description: Biography of a World War II-era physician whose work was a response to the suffering of Holocaust victims, and whose investigations laid the groundwork for the Nuremberg Medical Trials.
Brief description: Paul Weindling is Wellcome Trust Research professor in the History of Medicine, Department of History, Oxford Brookes University.
Review Quotes: Almost singlehandedly, Thompson initiated a new Nuremberg Trial targeted specifically at German doctors accused of 'Medical War Crimes.' Author Weindling traces in minute detail how an aroused Thompson overcame resistance in high Allied military and diplomatic circles (a few sought only practical results from those experiments without considering ethics). Thompson would have none of that. He and his adherents informed the public about monstrous experiments undertaken not only by the SS but also by civilian doctors. Those trials duly took place in 1947, thereby establishing an incontestable record of what had transpired in German camps, hospitals, and sanatoria . [An] exhaustive study.-- "JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE AND ALLIED SCIENCES"