The emergency room was busy the night I brought a friend there, and in a nearby bed, another patient was loudly pleading for drugs.
The staff repeatedly told him they would treat his pain as best they could, but they refused to give him certain medicines. I guessed the shouting man might have been addicted to painkillers. At one point a physician, after repeating his refusal to prescribe certain drugs, added, “I took an oath!”
As I overheard the exchange, I was reading about the latest political controversy. I wondered if a broad universal prohibition like the proverbial “First, do no harm” (associated somewhat erroneously with the Hippocratic Oath) could be applicable to public policy.
Politicians, like physicians, set priorities, identify problem root causes and remedy options, and weigh risk/benefit calculations on a wide range of complex issues. Hard choices are inevitable. Politicians take oaths of office, of course, and their decisions often end up in court to determine their constitutionality. But beyond being legal, shouldn’t all public policy, at a minimum, exclude cruelty?
Like other vices, cruelty seeks justification. People did not use simple cruelty to defend slavery, the Trail of Tears, the child separation policy at the southern border or other regrettable episodes of American history. Instead, they invoked economics, safety concerns, the preservation of western culture or other worries and fears.
Karl Brandt, a European surgeon, offers an extreme example of rationalized cruelty. Early in his career, he treated patients suffering intense pain from spinal injuries and other ailments caused by mining accidents. At one time, he aspired to work with humanitarian Albert Schweitzer at his hospital in Africa. But, through his fiancée, Brandt met a powerful and charismatic man and became his personal physician instead.
Brandt’s new patient and employer, Adolf Hitler, eventually picked him to help administer Aktion T4, the involuntary euthanasia program that targeted children and adults with physical and mental disabilities. In his book, “Hitler’s People,” the historian Richard Evans writes that Brandt was said to exhibit an “absolute lack of compassion” when observing prescribed murders, which were “neither neat nor painless.”
Bishop Clemens August von Galen of Münster publicly spoke out against the program. He also openly opposed the ongoing state confiscation of church property and the persecution of political opponents and undesirables, who were denied due process.
The bishop was a proud German, and his opposition was grounded in Church teaching. But his position also arguably echoed American ideals. His assertion that “the right to life, to inviolability, to freedom, is an indispensable part of any moral social order” bears comparison to the belief that all men have “unalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Both Bishop von Galen and Thomas Jefferson held that human rights do not originate with the state. They are a God-given and inherent part of being human. Governments, according to the Declaration of Independence, are created not to grant those rights but “to secure” them.
Like the American founders, Bishop von Galen knew he could be executed for his views. In fact, the Nazis made the decision to publicly hang him but, because of his stature, to wait until after they won the war. But they lost, so the bishop survived, and Karl Brandt was hanged, convicted of crimes against humanity, including conducting medical experiments on living humans without their consent.
He was unrepentant. Brandt, as Evans writes, claimed the euthanasia program was designed for “the improvement of the German race and the betterment of humanity.” The killings, he protested, were “a form of medical treatment, aimed not at the individual but at the collective organism of the German people.”
Survivors of the experiments, Evans writes, said doctors treated them as “mere objects without human qualities.”
At his execution, Brandt declared he was a victim of political revenge. He carried on about his innocence for so long that the impatient hangman threw the hood over the condemned man’s head while he was in mid-sentence, tightened the noose and opened the trapdoor.
The night I was with a friend in the emergency room, the staff might have felt frustrated with their loud and demanding patient. But their responsibility was to look out for his well-being, and that’s what they did. From what I observed, they didn’t treat any of their patients as less than fully human because of their disease or injury, faith or political beliefs, legal status, race or gender.
We should expect no less from our elected officials.
(Bishop Clemens August von Galen died in 1946 shortly after being made a cardinal. Pope Benedict XVI beatified him in 2005. His story is told in the book “The Lion of Münster” by Daniel Utrecht of the Oratory.)
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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