The summer I turned thirteen my family moved to Berlin from Canada. Although we were an essentially secular Jewish family, I had a basic Jewish education and quite a developed awareness of the history of World War II and the Holocaust. Like many young readers, I had been captivated by “The Diary of Anne Frank”. I’d also been to museums and seen plays, movies, and read many stories about the period and the plight of Europe’s Jews under the Nazis.

So although I was well aware of Germany’s brutal history, I wasn’t prepared for its omnipresence in everyday life in Berlin. Subtle, almost banal traces of the Nazi past were everywhere: in discreet memorial plaques on buildings, in the names of subway stops, or even on the ground beneath one’s feet, where the names of deported Nazi victims were engraved on special brass cobblestones in the sidewalks in front of the victims’ former homes.

But for Harvard anatomist Sabine Hildebrandt, growing up in postwar Germany meant being surrounded by a lack of evidence of her country’s dark past. Absent Jewish neighbors, abandoned synagogues, and uncomfortable silences: that was her experience. From the silence a curiosity emerged, a need to know that was the impetus for her ongoing quest to excavate the past, to understand it and to memorialize it. And that’s what she does in her book, “The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich”, the first systematic study of anatomy under National Socialism.

Sabine Hildebrandt is an associate professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She also teaches anatomy and history of anatomy at Harvard.

I knew I wanted to speak to Sabine when I saw her name mentioned in not one, but two stories in the New York Times related to German anatomy’s Nazi past; one about the notorious Pernkopf anatomical atlas, and the other related to her work as a member of the Historical Commission on the University of Strasbourg, which was taken over by the Nazis during the war and was the site of some harrowing abuses. I’ve linked to both articles below.

Speaking to Sabine was interesting on many levels. The history she has systematically laid out in her work is horrific, but unquestionably fascinating and valuable in its own right. But what is so special about her work, I think, is the way it prompts us to reflect on medicine’s relationship to power, and the discipline’s intrinsic potential not only for good, but also for evil.

On that note, a brief warning. My conversation with Sabine includes the discussion and description of medical violence and outright crimes in a context of tremendous brutality and disregard for human life. So please listen with caution and care.

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Links:
Sabine's bio
New York Times article on Pernkopf Atlas
New York Times article on Strasbourg University

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Recorded October 12, 2022
Music: Mr Smith
Art: Jeff Landman

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of the reasons I never tire of making this podcast is that each conversation brings with it a sense of surprise, an encounter with the unexpected. When I heard about Q Hammouri and the advocacy group they founded, Pride Ortho, I was eager to hear about their efforts to break the taboo of queerness in the straight, male-dominated field of orthopedics and to hear Q’s own story. Although we were able to speak at length about that advocacy work and the field of orthopedics, our conversation took us in many other directions, about the nature of identity, the fundamentals of medical thinking, and the ways something as simple as looking and seeing can transform our relationship to the world.

Q Hammouri is a pediatric orthopedist and spine surgeon. They are also an artist, immigrant, proud American, Buddhist, Muslim, Arab, and non-binary. They obtained their medical degree at the University of Jordan and immigrated to the US to pursue further medical training. They received their orthopaedic training at Yale, then completed a fellowship in spine surgery at New York University and a fellowship in pediatric orthopaedics at Columbia University. In 2013, they joined Northwell health to found the Pediatric Orthopaedic Department at Staten Island University Hospital, where they practiced until recently, performing the first pediatric spinal surgeries in the New York City borough of Staten Island. Q is the founding president of Pride Ortho, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group in orthopedics, and sits on the Diversity task forces of Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America and Scoliosis Research Society. In 2021, they were chosen as an Atlantic Health fellow for Health Equity for their work on LGBTQ access and advocacy.

What struck me most about Q’s observations and experience is the way their identity, their many identities in fact, are woven into their professional self, and the way they are as a physician and surgeon. I couldn’t help but see a connection between their attention to detail, their focus on observation as a surgeon and as a visual artist, and their sensitivity to their own appearance, to the ways their patients may feel perceived, seen or not seen, because of their medical condition, their sexual and gender identity, or both. Far from making them a less focused or engaged professional, Q’s different pursuits reinforce their sense of purpose and their grounding in what remains – even in our high tech, hyperspecialized age – medicine’s essence: tending to the suffering of other human beings.


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Links:
Pride Ortho
Q's art: Earl of Bushwick
The Whitest Specialty, by Usha Lee McFarling, Stat News, December 13, 2021

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Recorded October 18, 2022
Music: Mr Smith
Art: Jeff Landman

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So many forces that seem to be about other aspects of human life – economics, geography, identity, politics – are in fact also intimately connected to health. That connection isn’t just incidental, it’s fundamental: once you begin to see it, it’s everywhere, and it comes through in concrete, important ways, ways that impact human wellbeing.

Transportation - how we choose to get around - is one such aspect of daily life. We usually talk about it as traffic patterns, transit fares, bus schedules, and commute times. For some, it’s a fascinating subject, for others, it’s simply background noise: there, but hardly worth remarking upon.

And yet getting from one place to another is something we nearly all have to do, most often on a daily basis. I started riding a bicycle to get around my city about 15 years ago, and I’ve loved it ever since. I can’t get everywhere I need to go by bike, but it’s long been my preferred means of transportation. More recently, I’ve become interested in the greater benefits of cycling, the factors that influence people’s decisions to choose one mode of transportation over another, and how better transit makes for better lives, and even a better world.

At the same time, I’ve seen more and more news of rising rates of car crashes, pedestrian deaths, and cars becoming less safe instead of safer, over the past few years. That’s news I’ve found it difficult to ignore.

As I’ve learned more about these issues, the cascading implications of something as basic as how you get to work, drop your children off at school, or run your errands have revealed themselves to me. Of course there’s traffic and noise and air pollution, but there’s also your individual health, your risk of injury – of death even – the look of the built environment and your feeling of connection to it. I really believe - and there’s evidence to support this - that how you get around even impacts your mood.

To explore the health and safety dynamics surrounding urban transit, I was fortunate to be able to speak to Kay Teschke, Professor Emeritus of the University of British Columbia's School of Population and Public Health, and a leading academic in the field. After beginning a career focused on occupational exposure risks, Kay started a new research program in 2004 called “Cycling in Cities”. That research focused on the interaction between factors like the type of bike route available to riders, and the risk of injury or the decision to ride a bike. It has contributed scientific evidence for building routes that welcome cycling in North American cities, and Kay has been involved in provincial, national, and international policy making related to cycling. Even after her retirement, “Cycling in Cities” continues to be a thriving research initiative.

Talking to Kay helped me better understand the facts around cycling and urban transit, and to more clearly see how, as a society, the way we get around isn’t pure happenstance: it’s the result of deliberate decisions and clear choices – and we live with the consequences of those choices every day.

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Links:

Kay's research and Twitter
Cycling in Cities and its successor, CHATR
"The Deadliest Road in America", by Marin Cogan, Vox

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Recorded September 27, 2022
Music: Mr Smith
Art: Jeff Landman

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.