The Medical Profession and the Prevention of Torture

Abstract

Torture remains one of the most abhorrent concomitants of political repression today. In the past four years alone, governments in one third of the world's countries have systematically practiced or tacitly condoned torture or ill treatment.1 Security agents, specially trained interrogators, and sometimes medical personnel use such techniques as prolonged beatings, electric shock, and mind-altering drugs, mostly in secret, to interrogate, punish, and intimidate political dissenters and social nonconformists.2 It is alarming that state-sanctioned brutality exists at all, but it is doubly alarming that medical personnel participate in this brutality. Medical professionals are trained to heal, but some, for various . . .