PROF LEON PITERMAN
To coincide with the Holocaust Centre's exhibition on Nazi medicine, the Centre will hold a forum on Nazi Medicine: The role of health professionals as agents of State control in November 2008.
The atrocities committed by Nazi doctors and health workers against Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and political prisoners are a well-known and well-documented part of Holocaust history. Although Dr Mengele was one of the most infamous perpetrators, he was not alone. Experimentation and torture were systematically carried out, leaving indelible scars and irreparable damage to body, mind and soul. This was in contravention of medical ethics, including agreements to which the Germans themselves were signatories. We still have survivors who can relate their own horrific testimonies.
However, the Nazis were not alone in enlisting or coercing health professionals to engage in acts of torture to meet the goals of the State. State-sponsored torture with medical assistance has continued and still occurs today. There are well-documented cases of psychiatrists in the former Soviet Union certifying political prisoners insane and then engaging in unethical treatment practices, including inappropriate electrical shock therapy and the use of drugs in order to extract information. There was complicity at worst, or abrogation of duty at best, by doctors in the documented torture and death of Steve Biko and others during the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
We are less clear about the role of doctors and health professionals in the Pol Pot killings in Cambodia, but we do know about the role of health professionals in torture in Chile and various African conflicts. And who knows what is taking place in Guantanamo Bay? Neglect or failure to whistle blow may also have occurred closer to home in our own infamous migrant detention centres. Whilst this may not be equivalent to torture, medical professionals turning a blind eye may have the same outcomes.
Doctors are not immune from perpetrating mass murder or serial killings, either directly, as in the case of the infamous Dr Harold Shipman, the British general practitioner who has been accused of killing over two hundred and fifty patients, or indirectly, as with the recently captured Dr Radovan Karadzic. Dr Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader and a psychiatrist by training, who has been accused of overseeing the ethnic cleansing of over eight thousand Muslim men and boys. Still at large is the second in charge of Al Qaeda, Dr Al-Zawahri, a paediatrician and the founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who has been indicted for the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Dar Es Salam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya.
So what makes individuals who take a Hippocratic oath, who have been trained to save lives and respect the sanctity of life, turn to violence, mass murder or acts of torture and unethical experimentation? Is this part of the dichotomy of good and evil in human beings generally? Are there any circumstances at all where a medical practitioner can justify complicity with torture? What if torture extracted vital information that might save thousands of lives? What if a suspected terrorist planning the Twin Towers bombing were captured and the administration of drugs or electrical stimuli extracted details of the plot? In cases like this, should medical personnel assist?
This forum will explore both the causes and the effects of health professionals' participation in State-sponsored crimes. Everyone is welcome, but people working or studying in health, legal or social welfare fields are strongly encouraged to attend. The expert panel will include Paul Komesaroff (Ethics), Dr Ida Kaplan (Psychology), Prof Harry Minas (Psychiatry), Prof Chris Goddard (Social Work), Dr George Halasz (Child and Adolescent Psychiatry) and Prof Ian Freckelton (Law).
Professor Piterman, Monash University