The conference

Medical Review Auschwitz: Medicine Behind the Barbed Wire is an annual international conference organized to educate the world’s medical community about the violations of medical ethics during the Second World War, with a special focus on the behavior of physicians and other medical professionals in Nazi medical institutions and concentration camps or other places of imprisonment, and the ethical implications of Nazi medicine for contemporary medical practice and healthcare policy.

The first conference took place in 2018 in Kraków, Poland, which has been the site of the event ever since. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the organizers to first postpone and then transfer the 3rd edition of the conference to the virtual space in 2021. In 2022, the event returned to the live, in-person format and took place in Kraków again. The 4th, 2022 edition featured the first ceremony of the Z. J. Ryn Awards for unique contribution to the Medical Review Auschwitz project and for the best lecture at the conference.

The conference is organised by the Polish Institute of Evidence-Based Medicine and the medical publisher Medycyna Praktyczna, in collaboration with the Department of Bioethics and the Holocaust of the International Chair of Bioethics, the Maimonides Institute for Medicine, Ethics and the Holocaust, the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, the University of Colorado Center for Bioethics and Humanities, the Jagiellonian University Medical College, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, the Kraków Medical Society, and the Polish Association for Spiritual Care in Medicine, under the auspices of the American College of Physicians.

See the Medical Review Auschwitz conference website.

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