By Renate Frydman, Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer

The large lecture hall was humming with youthful voices. First-year students at Wright State University’s Boonshoft School of Medicine — 105 of them — were going to hear a survivor of the Holocaust tell her story.

Also on the agenda to speak that day was an expert on Nazi medicine for this course about medical ethics led by their professor, Dr. Ashley Fernandes.

Their young faces, some with warm smiles, were unsure just how this would impact their studies. As the two-hour class progressed, along with Fernandes’ comments and explanations, their eyes were open to the reason.

Fernandes says when a survivor speaks to his first-year students, they rank the survivor as the “highest rated speaker of the year.”

“Not only did it raise awareness about the subject of medicine and the Holocaust, but brought to light very important issues and considerations that many of us have probably never considered before,” one student explains. “This presentation made me cry.”

Social and Ethical Issues in Medicine is a required 15-week course for Wright State’s first-year medical students.

Fernandes and Dayton resident Rhoda Mahran also lead the fourth-year elective, Medicine and the Holocaust. That class meets 10 times over the year, from September through April. This year, 18 students are enrolled.

In 2008, Fernandes developed the concept for the fourth-year course.

He was already teaching the first-year medical ethics course when he was introduced to Mahran, who taught about Nazi medicine at Loyola University in Chicago.

“We both believe one shouldn’t forget history and that there are many ethical lessons to be learned from the period of the Holocaust,” Mahran says.

“Are we really as physicians honoring people as individuals or are we blindly following science?” Fernandes asks. “Nazi doctors followed the laws and standards they were given. Students want to know what is legal, and that’s not enough.”

Born in the U.S., Fernandes’ parents came from Mumbai, India. He was raised in Toledo, received his medical degree from Ohio State, and holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in bioethics from Georgetown University.

Fernandes is chair of the ethics committee at The Children’s Medical Center of Dayton. Two days a week, he practices at an underserved patient clinic in Springfield.

He cites French philosopher Jacques Maritian’s book, The Person and the Common Good, as an example of stressing the dignity of the person as central to everything we do.

“You have to put the singular person first,” he tells his students. “In Nazism, a person was good as long as they provided a worth to the state.”

“The more you read about this subject, the more it affects you emotionally,” Fernandes, who was raised Catholic, says.

“How much more could have been done by the Catholic Church.”

He was affected early in life by the way Pope John Paul II tried to make amends.

“Part of my passion (for this subject) is penitence. I want to tell the Jewish story, to honor this group of people,” he explains. “I want to change the heart and mind of medical students.”

Mahran was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn in 1932 and was raised by her grandparents. She says her mother had tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitarium when she was 5. Mahran didn’t see her mother again until she was 14, right after World War II. Her father’s family, originally from East Prussia, perished in Latvia during the Holocaust.

She wanted to go into nursing after she graduated high school, but her father didn’t have the money. After raising three boys with her husband, Joel, Mahran went back to school at Mundelein College, then an all women’s Catholic college in Chicago that had a weekend program.

During the week, she worked at a junior high school with children who had muscular dystrophy and cerebral palsy.

At the age of 50 she received her bachelor’s degree in philosophy with a minor in history from Mundelein, which is now part of Loyola.

“Through philosophy, I became very interested in ethics,” Mahran says. “Because of my mother’s illness, I was interested in health. A (Catholic) sister encouraged me to get a master’s degree in philosophy. I also completed a practicum in health care ethics.”

Through a professor, she was introduced to Dr. John Michalczyk, chair of the Fine Arts Department at Boston College, and a documentary filmmaker. Michalczyk sent her a documentary he produced for PBS about Nazi medicine. “That started it,” she says.

In 1993, Mahran received her master’s degree in philosophy and health care ethics from Loyola  and Michalczyk helped her put together a course on this subject. “He was my mentor and was so helpful.”

Mahran brought the course on Nazi medicine to the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola. As soon as she graduated, she began teaching nursing ethics at Oakton Community College nursing school.

In 1998, she and her husband moved to Dayton where their son, Lewis, practices medicine. In 2008, her husband died. She had no intention of teaching again.

Then she met Fernandes. She says the challenge of leading a course on Nazi medicine at Wright State was just what she needed after the loss of her husband. Mahran teaches as a volunteer, with the title of voluntary adjunct assistant professor in community medicine.

“I believe the world should never forget what a cultured, industrialized country is capable of doing under a demonic leadership,” Mahran says.

The American Medical Society and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum are now in collaboration to encourage all medical schools to teach a course on medical ethics and Nazi medicine.