Abstracts fra Bibliotek for Læger 3/2018

ORIGINALARTIKEL

Ingen venn av de små skritts politikk

Raimund Wolfert
Interessekonflikter

No friend of a small steps’ politics. The Berlin doctor Werner Becker and his connections to the early Danish gay movement.

Bibl Læger 2018;210:196-219.

In the early 1950ies, the Berlin doctor Werner Becker (1927-1980) was one of the most distinctive activists in the second German homosexual emancipation movement. Together with others, he tried to revive the first lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights organisation in history, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. Becker worked in Hirschfeld’s tradition, both as a campaigner and as a physician and a scientist. Since he knew Danish, he even published in the Scandinavian gay magazine Vennen (The Friend). Around 1955, Becker left Germany for Canada, and when he returned to Berlin years later and became an approved psychoanalyst, he wanted nothing to do with his former involvement in the emancipation movement. Thanks to Becker’s preserved correspondence with Kurt Hiller, it can be shown that it was not only disillusionment about his fellow campaigners that lead Becker to retract from activism, but also severe threats of police investigation and criminal charges. Paragraph 175, which criminalised homosexual acts between males in Germany, was not abolished from the German Criminal Code until 1994. In the early post-war era, this German legislation made homosexual activism virtually impossible.

INTERVIEW
Den spanske syge
Chefredaktøren

 

KUNSTPAUSE
Körper 2.0
Magnus Kaslov

 

INTERVIEW
Hjælp!
Jacob Skyggebjerg & Martin Balslev Jørgensen

 

ETISK STUEGANG
Hvilken etisk fordring?
Katla Heðinsdóttir 
& Nana Cecilie 
Halmsted Kongsholm
Interessekonflikter (Katla Heðinsdóttir)
Interessekonflikter (Nana Cecilie 
Halmsted Kongsholm)

What ethical demand? Reflections on dignity.

Bibl Læger 2018;210:248-57.

Despite the frequent use of “dignity” in ethical discourse, the concept is remarkably unclear. It is often used as grounding incompatible positions within a debate, most famously in debates about euthanasia. Is dignity, then, a useful concept in medical ethics at all? We argue that it is. In this article, we take a brief look at the history of the concept, from the ancient Roman meaning of status or rank, through Kantian moral philosophy, in which dignity is inherent in all humans and grounds moral duties, to its current association with human rights. While dignity is too vague a concept to yield any specific action, guidance or specifications of what is truly dignified, examining people’s conceptions of dignity (as well as dignity violations) can help illuminate what it is we want to uphold in our efforts to respect human dignity, and this can help us consider ethical issues in a more careful way.

 

BILLEDER FRA MIN HVERDAG
Folkemødet set fra Bornholms Hospital
Anja U. Mitchell

 

INTERVIEW
Fra revolution til flødeskumskage
Chefredaktøren

 

MINDEORD
Fysiologen og hans pumpe
Morten A. Skydsgaard