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Political violence and the physician
Amanda J. Redig, MD, PhD
The author (AΩA, Northwestern University, 2010) is a
resident in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital in Boston. This essay won second prize
in the 2010 Helen H. Glaser Student Essay Competition.
Human health in the early days of a new millennium
stands at the crossroads of a paradox: thanks to a vast
increase in knowledge and technology, we are more
effective than ever before in both the saving and the taking of
lives. Indeed, the twentieth century is characterized by two
incongruous realities. On the one hand, we have the hope and
optimism generated by groundbreaking strides against the suffering
caused by disease. Yet coupled to such progress is the
dark legacy of genocide, war, and political violence on a scale
previously unimaginable. What makes reconciling these two
competing visions so difficult for the medical profession is the
fact that physicians have been instrumental in advancing not
only the achievements but also the atrocities.
Decades after their deaths, physicians such as Jonas Salk
or Alexander Fleming remain household names because of
the effect their work has had on the advancement of medicine’s
ability to heal. In contrast, there are also physicians
whose names have become synonymous with the very worst
of humanity, such as the “Angel of Death,” Dr. Josef Mengele.
Fortunately, there are far more famous than infamous physicians,
but no matter how much the medical profession may
wish to think otherwise, the physician who chooses to embrace
death over life is not an anomaly.
The list of physicians who have participated in and furthered
political violence is extensive. Nazi physicians directed
the mass murder of the weak, the ill, and the disabled in 1930s
Germany, as well as the horrific medical experiments of Nazi
World War II concentration camps. Japan’s World War II
Project 731, led by Dr. Shiro
Ishii, killed thousands of POWs
and Chinese and Soviet citizens
in experiments on germ warfare
and vivisection. Among other
historic firsts, including leadership
of the first organization
to use hijacked airliners as a
political tool, Palestinian pediatrician
George Habash was also
responsible for orchestrating a
rocket attack on a bus full of
children in which nine passen-
Major Nidal Hasan
HO/Reuters/Corbis
gers died. Out of the violence that turned neighbor against
neighbor in the former Yugoslavia, psychiatrist Radovan
Karadzic is currently standing trial in the Hague for his role
in the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebenica and the
Siege of Sarajevo. Al-Qaeda counts numerous physicians as
operatives, from number two Ayman al-Zawahiri to the individuals
responsible for the failed suicide bombing at Glasgow
International Airport in 2007. Most recently, Fort Hood
psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan was responsible for the worst
attack of terrorism on a domestic U.S. military installation in
American history.
Clearly, incongruity aside, physicians are not exempt from
participation in the most chilling of crimes against humanity.
Despite the repugnance with which most physicians view
such actions on the part of their colleagues, the fact remains
that politically-motivated violence perpetrated by physicians
happens far too often, across all lines of politics, religion,
and ethnicity. The questions to be asked are thus far more
complex than whether or not a profession built on the best of
intentions can exist side by side with great evil. Instead, the
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