In this landmark exhibition, Deadly Medicine: Creating the
Master Race, the Museum focuses on the physicians,
psychiatrists, anthropologists, public health officials, and
others who supported and, ultimately, implemented the Nazi
racial eugenics program that culminated in genocide: the
Holocaust. The topic is especially timely as our society debates
such issues as cloning and the legal definitions of life and
death. The exhibition sounds useful warnings against the
unchecked subordination of individual rights to the welfare of
the larger community, as well as abuses of scientific knowledge
in the name of progress or the “greater good.” In recent years,
museums have become increasingly active as centers of informal
civic education. In its 1991 report Education and the Public
Dimension of Museums, the American Association of Museums
charged museums to “help nurture a humane citizenry equipped to
make informed choices in a democracy and to address the
challenges and opportunities of an increasingly global societ