'Medical Review – Auschwitz': Medicine behind the Barbed Wire
The bibliography of the medicine practised in Nazi German concentration camps is extremely abundant as regards publications, both in Poland and worldwide. Research in Kraków on the medical, psychological, and social consequences of the Second World War and its death camps started in the 1950s, and its results were published in Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim (PL-O; English title 'Medical Review – Auschwitz') a unique journal of inestimable value for its scientific content and as a historical record1.
In the 1950s a group of medical practitioners from Kraków embarked on a research project on concentration camp survivors and published their results in PL-O. They worked under the patronage of the Kraków Medical Society and its successive presidents: Professor Józef Bogusz, Professor Maria Rybakowa, and Professor Igor Gościński. The research was first carried out in the Psychiatric Clinic of the Kraków Medical Academy, and subsequently in the Social Pathology Department of the Chair of Psychiatry at the Jagiellonian University Medical College.
The head of the team of researchers was Professor Zdzisław J. Ryn, and its members were medical practitioners and psychiatrists Andrzej Jakubik, Małgorzata Dominik, Elżbieta Leśniak, Roman Leśniak, Józef K. Gierowski, Janusz Heitzman, and Aleksander B. Skotnicki. The results of their work were published in 460 books and papers. Their pioneering studies launched a long series of research on the psychiatric aspects of "KZ Syndrome", the post-concentration camp syndrome now recognized as a form of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).
Successive numbers of the journal started appearing shortly after the project was launched. They were edited by Professor Józef Bogusz (1904–1993)2, Professor Antoni Kępiński (1918–1972)3, Dr. Stanisław Kłodziński, MD (1918–1990)4,5, and Jan Masłowski, M.A., (1931–2012)6, who replaced Dr. Piotr Bożek on the board of editors. Prof. Zdzisław J. Ryn was an associate of the editors, two of whom had personal experience of incarceration in a concentration camp. Professor Kępiński had been held in Miranda de Ebro (Spain), and Dr. Kłodziński was an Auschwitz and Mauthausen survivor. In Auschwitz he had worked as a medical orderly, helping sick prisoners. In January 1945 he was transferred to Mauthausen. With the passage of time the journal built up a reputation as one of the main sources of information on the pathologies associated with the war and concentration camps.
31 volumes were published between 1961–1991, with a total of 7,200 pages containing 1,050 papers by 477 authors, covering a broad range of subjects. The main issues were medical and legal; philosophical and ethical; systems of extermination; questions relating to the health of concentration camp inmates, including starvation, disease and pseudo-medical experiments; repressive measures against the educated classes; the oppression and murder of children; problems associated with reparations and compensation; the oppression and murder of Polish, Jewish, Roma, and Russian nationals, and prisoners of many other nationalities; and the biographies of medical doctors, both those who were held as prisoners in the camps and those who were functionaries in them.7
As a scientific journal, PL-O is in a class of its own worldwide. The Senate of the Republic of Poland has nominated it on two occasions for the Nobel Peace prize (1993 and 1994).