Abstract

A chilling subplot in the twentieth-century saga of state-sponsored mass murder, torture, and other atrocities was the widespread incidence of medical complicity. Nazi doctors' human and assistance in genocidal killing are the most oft-cited exemplar, but wartime Japanese physicians' human vivisection and other grotesque practices rivaled the Nazi medical horrors. Measured by these standards, Soviet psychiatrists' role in repressing dissent, Latin American and Turkish military doctors' complicity in torture, and even the South African medical profession's systematic involvement in apartheid may seem, to some, almost prosaic. Yet these and other reported cases of medical complicity in human rights abuse compel an inquiry into medicine's vulnerability to becoming an adjunct to illicit state purposes