Dr. Frederick Sweet (a mensch): 1938 – 2013

Dr. Frederick Sweet: May 15, 1938 – March 7, 2013

For Justice:
Anybody who ever came in contact with Fred knows how willing he was to unmask the dark side of the medical field* and to fight for the underdog,
In parallel to his jumping in the water more than once to save capsized strangers, he had gone out of his way to help people who may have been struggling in one way or another, over and over.
The memorial service in his honor made it clear that the force of “Sweet-ness” had reached his children and a great many others. As his coffin laid there with the flag of the earth on top, his presence and his strength seemed as present as ever.
*Echoing his own work [and surrounded by his own comments below] he once sent me a paper by Jeremy Hugh Baron on Genocidal Doctors (from The Journal of Royal  Society of Medicine).
[In a 1985 documentary film (perhaps you have seen it) “Searching for Mengele,” Professor Yehuda Bauer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem is asked whether it is possible today for there to be produced a Dr. Mengele.  Bauer responds, not only is it possible it is inevitable because since Mengele’s days nothing has changed at universities all over the world that teach science and technology but not the evil purposes to which such technologies can be put — such as producing a Holocaust. Not more than ten years after Bauer had made that comment, the genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda, and other places descended upon us.]

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Frederick Sweet, who died last week at age 74, was a professor and researcher at Washington University. His recent work took him to Bosnia to investigate the role medical doctors played in genocide.
He found that physicians were involved in many of the acts of genocide of the 20th century, including the Nazi Holocaust and acts of mass murder in Rwanda and Bosnia.
He wanted to know how someone who took the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm could end up as a mass murderer.
His research with his wife, Rita Marika Csapo-Sweet, led to interviews with a Bosnian police chief, who produced the names of victims of genocide along with the names of doctors he said had participated in the murders, his wife recalled Monday.
Professor Sweet never completed his investigation.
“His death is very untimely,” his wife said. She plans to finish the research along with the book they were writing.
Professor Sweet died Thursday (March 7, 2013) at Barnes-Jewish Hospital following a stroke, his family said. He and his wife were longtime residents of the Dogtown neighborhood in St. Louis.
Professor Sweet first did research into breast and ovarian cancer while at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in Rye, N.Y. He earned his doctorate at the University of Alberta in Canada and in 1971 joined the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University.
He was a chemist by training, but research money for his field of molecular endocrinology was becoming more difficult to obtain. While editing an article for a medical journal, he came across references to Dr. Carl Clauberg.
Clauberg was the physician who discovered the classic rabbit test for determining early pregnancy in women. He went on to join the Nazi Party in Germany and during World War II was placed in charge of finding rapid and inexpensive sterilization methods through experiments on Jewish women at Auschwitz-Birkenau. That was an infamous concentration camp where Dr. Josef Mengele, another physician, also performed experiments.
In 2010, Professor Sweet was awarded a Fulbright grant to conduct research in Bosnia-Herzegovina on medical doctors and genocide. Three medical doctors, including Dr. Radovan Karadzic, were put on trial at the Hague for crimes of genocide.
Professor Sweet was investigating what personality traits the German Nazis and the Bosnian [Ed. Bosnian Serb] doctors shared. “Moreover,” he asked, “why did these murderous people choose medicine as an occupation?”
He concluded that genocidal doctors share two characteristics: They have chameleon-like personalities that allow them to easily adapt to any social group. And they are born lacking empathy. “They are incapable of feeling or understanding other people’s pain and suffering,” he wrote.
His goal was to assemble profiles of how the doctors had evolved from students to become mass murderers.
Frederick Sweet was born in New York, where his parents had immigrated from Hungary. His father had been a pianist before he lost his hearing to the Spanish flu. He ran a deli and was a traveling champagne salesman. His mother was an accomplished seamstress who made the samples worn by designer Bill Blass’ runway models.
In St. Louis, Professor Sweet and his wife lived in a historic home built from parts of the pavilions from the 1904 World’s Fair. Fire heavily damaged their home in November.
Visitation will be at 10:30 a.m. today at Berger Memorial Chapel, 4715 McPherson Avenue, followed by a memorial service at 11 a.m. Burial will be United Hebrew Temple Cemetery.
Survivors, in addition to his wife, include two daughters, Sarah Sweet and Cassandra Sweet, both of the San Francisco area; two sons, Brennan Sweet of Cranford, N.J., and Joshua Sweet of the San Francisco area; a brother, Bob Sweet of New York; and four grandchildren.