Public Health and the Holocaust.

“I didn’t know I had an interest in public health,” says 4+1 student Erin Miller.

She came to Boston University as a psychology major on a pre-med track, looking for a way to combine medicine with her interest in Holocaust studies. Then she met Michael Grodin, professor of health law, policy & management, and soon became his research assistant with the support of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).

On October 21, UROP named Grodin an Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor at the 19th Annual Boston University Undergraduate Research Symposium, in recognition of the research he and Miller have done at the intersection of Holocaust studies and medicine: public health.

Miller is assisting Grodin with the book Spiritual Resistance and Rabbinic Responsa During the Holocaust. In concentration camps and ghettos, religious Jews sought guidance from rabbis under horrific circumstances. How the rabbis formulated that guidance, from texts consulted or remembered to decisions made for their congregants’ mental and physical health, is the book’s subject.

“This is part of a much larger project which has been going on for 38 years,” Grodin says. The complex relationship between the Holocaust and health—from ethics to psychological resilience—are central to his career.

Grodin is the director of the Project on Medicine and the Holocaust at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, as well as core faculty in Judaic Studies at the College of Arts & Sciences, a professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the School of Medicine, and the medical ethicist for Boston Medical Center.

The Holocaust was a human-made disaster of tremendous scale, Grodin says, so it contains myriad lessons for public health. “This topic allows us to study the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping,” he says, “to explore the danger of silence and indifference in the face of human rights abuses, and to examine the use and abuse of power.”

More directly, he says, “public health and medicine played such a crucial role” in the Holocaust. Grodin explains eugenics arose from the world of medicine and public health, and was in turn put into practice by the Nazis. “The physicians and the public health professionals needed the Nazis to carry out their eugenic program, and Nazis needed the physicians and public health people to medicalize and to legitimize, to say this is really a scientific project.”

The doctors’ trials at Nuremberg and wider recognition of the horrors of the Holocaust led to today’s standards of human rights and medical ethics. Studying the Holocaust helps physicians and public health workers understand the purpose of those standards, Grodin says. It also teaches them to recognize—and intervene in—contemporary parallels, what Grodin calls “shadows of Nazism,” from eugenics-influenced sterilization to the resurgence of political totalitarianism.

Miller says working with Grodin in the Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights piqued her curiosity about public health. After taking the undergraduate introduction to public health course taught by Clinical Assistant Professor of Community Health Sciences Sophie Godley, Miller was hooked.

“I really couldn’t pursue medicine until I had a stronger foundation in public health,” she decided, so she went into the 4+1 program. “Understanding public health and understanding the structures of how people live is so important in order to help people in the best possible way.”

Miller says her discovery of public health is only one of the benefits of working with Grodin. “I couldn’t have a better mentor,” she says. In her nomination letter to UROP for the mentoring award, Miller wrote, “Dr. Grodin treats all of his research assistants as colleagues.”

That appreciation goes both ways. “Her role’s been everything,” Grodin says. Miller has served as an administrator, researcher, and co-translator, tracking down materials from around the world and co-authoring a paper: “She’s been just indispensable.”

Miller says she is also indebted to UROP. “UROP has been funding our project for six rounds, which is incredible,” she says, supporting her work with Grodin for three years, including summers. “It’s really been one of the best opportunities I’ve had at BU.”

—Michelle Samuels