Kurt Aterman, MUDR, MB, BCh BAO HONS, DCH, MRCP, PhD, DSc, FRCPath: "A Small Man With a Very Large Cerebrum and a Soul to Match"

Dick van Velzen and the Burnside warehouse organ scandal in Nova Scotia, Canada

Dick van Velzen practiced as a pediatric pathologist at Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool, England from September 1988 until December 1995; he then relocated to the IWK-Grace Health Centre, a children's and maternity hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where he practiced until he was fired for cause in January 1998. About a year and a half later, his practice in Liverpool came under increasing scrutiny, with the initial focus on the massive collection of post-mortem pediatric organs he had accumulated for planned future research on sudden infant death syndrome. Soon, a Parliamentary Inquiry began investigating the full scope of his Liverpool practice. During the Inquiry, another organ-hoarding scandal erupted; van Velzen, when leaving Halifax after his dismissal, had put his family's personal belongings into a storage facility at Burnside Industrial Park and then did not pay bills. As his belongings were being prepared for auction, formalin-fixed organs were found, and a Canada-wide arrest warrant for disrespect for human remains was issued by the Halifax Police. While the Alder Hey scandal resulted in a 535-page-long Parliamentary Report and the Human Tissue Act, van Velzen was never charged criminally in the UK. The largely unknown story of his second organ scandal in Halifax, is related here. Although he had obtained the body parts with the consent of the parents of the child to which they had belonged, his failure to properly identify and store them traumatized parents already impacted by his organ-hoarding in the UK, traumatized additional parents in Halifax, and resulted in significant waste of public resources in investigating the case. He pled guilty to "indignity to a human body" in Canada and was fined and placed on 12 months' probation.

A fragmented career? Life and work of the Jewish pathologist Kurt Aterman (1913-2002)

Kurt Aterman (1913-2002) is regarded one of the leading experimental pathologists of his time with a strong focus on pediatric and hepatopathology. Without doubt, he is also one of the most international representatives of his field: Grown up in the German-speaking area, he studied medicine in the former Czechoslovakia and the United Kingdom, and then taught at universities and hospitals in the USA and Canada. Less well known is the fact that he was persecuted by the Nazi regime because of his Jewish decent after the Nazis started their annexation policy. Aterman was able to flee to Great Britain, but experienced a career setback there. This is precisely where the present study comes in: The overriding goal of this paper is to trace Kurt Aterman's life and work, which has been scarcely researched to date. It focuses on the decisive milestones and setbacks of his career, the question of compensation after the war, and the background and characteristics of his (re)connection with the German academic community. The study is based on previously unevaluated archive material and a re-analysis of the relevant research literature, supplemented by an autobiographical essay (1991). The paper concludes that Kurt Aterman always put his personal convictions above his career ambitions. It is equally remarkable that he maintained his relations with the German scientific community despite his repressive experiences in the Third Reich. In return he was made an honorary member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Pathologie (German Society for Pathology (1990/91).