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Warsaw Ghetto's Jewish Doctors Documented Medical Effects of Nazi Starvation Policies
(The Conversation) Merry Fitzpatrick and Irwin Rosenberg - 80 years ago, a group of starving Jewish scientists and doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto were collecting data on their starving patients in the hope that their research would benefit future generations through better ways to treat malnutrition, and they wanted the world to know of Nazi atrocities. They recorded their findings in a book titled Maladie de Famine (in English, The Disease of Starvation: Clinical Research on Starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942), recently rediscovered in the Tufts University library. The book records how starvation was used as a weapon of oppression and annihilation as the Nazis were systematically exterminating all Jews in their occupied territories. Physicians in the ghetto estimated that Jews were able to consume 800 calories a day through a combination of rations and smuggling. That's about half the calories volunteers consumed in a study on starvation conducted near the end of World War II by researchers at the University of Minnesota, and less than a third of the average energy needs of an adult male. On July 22, 1942, Nazi forces entered the ghetto and destroyed the two hospitals. Patients and some of the doctors were killed outright or deported to be gassed. With their own demise approaching, the remaining doctors met secretly, transforming their data into a series of research articles. By October, 300,000 Jews from the ghetto had already been gassed, and another 100,000 had been killed through forced starvation and disease. Merry Fitzpatrick is Research Assistant Professor of Nutrition Science and Policy and Irwin Rosenberg is Professor Emeritus of Nutrition and Medicine at Tufts University.