In 2024, NEJM had two articles on Nazism and 1930s medicine, as covered by NEJM.
The first 2024 article was, Abi-Rached & Brandt, Nazism and the Journal, 390:1157-61.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2307319
Abi-Rached's article focused on a 1935 article, Recent Changes in German Health Insurance under the Hitler Government, May 30, 1935, Davis, NEJM 212:1037-42.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM193505302122206
The Davis article broadly discussed features and emphases of Nazi social medicine and policy, with one mention that Jewish physicians were excluded. (There was also 1 follow-up letter & reply).
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The second 2024 NEM article was, Reede JY et al., Eugenics, Nazism, and the Journal, 391:e50 [transcript].
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Harvard Gazette covered the Abi-Rached & Brandt article in May 2024. "How do you read organization's silence over the rise of Nazism?" by Alvin Powell.
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The two 2024 NEJM articles (with shared authorship) focus on the relative silence of NEJM on German medicine, save for the single Davis article.
A comparison was made with JAMA (which had somewhat more articles on Nazism).
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First, I hope that the citation to Davis led some readers to the 1935 original article, easily available via the NEJM archive. Many themes in German medicine of the 1930s echo today - urban versus rural, public health vs treatment of disease, politics of physician organizations, specialists vs generalists, funding, etc.
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Second, the deliberate 2024 focus on medical journal archives may miss an important point. There have a been a number of popular history books in the last few years about Nazism and pro-German sentiment in the US during the 1930s. (Lindbergh vs Roosevelt, Duffy, 2010; Those Angry Days 1939-1941, Olson, 2013, Hitler's American Friends, Hart, 2018, others).
Since NEJM is an academic journal, of special interest is the late Stephen Norwood's book, "The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower," Cambridge Univ Press, 2011.
And focusing on Boston and Massachusetts - Available open access is a 2008 chapter by Norwood in the journal, American Jewish History, Johns Hopkins MUSE, page 38, "Legitimzing Nazis: Harvard University and the Hitler Regime 1933-1937."
https://www.scribd.com/document/212918635/Harvard-e-Hitler-33-37
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jF0W51YVlSdKZ0jlnY5u0bSHkWmtimxW/view?usp=sharing
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The relative silence of NEJM, and the brevity of Davis' reference to Jewish physicians, becomes clearer in the context of work like Norwood's.
It is difficult to view 1934 except through the lens of the Hoocaust and 1945. However, when 1933 and 1934 were unfolding, Nazism had a far smaller role in world politics and even the frightful early persecution of Jewish physicians would have been comparable to the treatmentt of Black physicians in the US (among numerous examples), which also likely had minimal if any coverage in JAMA and NEJM in the same year. [Re Black physicians in the US and Jewish physicians in Germany, see Hitler's American Model, Whitman, 2017].
The limited coverage of Nazism in NEJM can be appropriately paired with topics like pro-Nazism at the same time at Harvard (Norwood), although this takes us out of the narrow domain of medical journal studies. While, in the Powell interview, Brandt comments, "The Davis piece is remarkable for its opacity, its ability to focus on a [economic] reform and not have any context around it." But the Abi-Rached Brandt article also takes a rather narrow focus, focusing on NEJM with relatively little on the more general partly pro-Nazi society as documented by Norwood, Hart, and others.
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There is a recent book on quite sharp leftward and rightward swings in AMA politics, 1880s-1980s, in which the 1930s chapter is pertinent. Peter A Swenson, 2021, Disorder: A history of reform, reaction, and money in American medicine.
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