"What are the consequences when a profession like medicine can go so far off the tracks?" Dickey Center Director Kenneth Yalowitz asked an audience of undergraduates, medical students and community members in a panel discussing medicine's role in torture held Tuesday in Filene Auditorium.
Yalowitz posed that question while introducing a historian, a lawyer and a military doctor, participants in the panel "Military Torture and Medicine: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on the Occurrence and Ramifications of Torture."
The panel brought together three experts from varied backgrounds to discuss the relationship between torture and medicine, especially in light of the opening of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and the torture debate that has embroiled the United States government since 2002.
Dirk Rupnow, a Holocaust expert and visiting professor of Jewish studies at the College, spoke first and acknowledged the difficulty of comparing the Holocaust to any current events, while still noting lessons that can be drawn from the Holocaust.
"What is important to understand is that the Holocaust didn't begin with Auschwitz," Rupnow said. "It began very much in the middle of German society. There are different steps needed for the perpetrators to arrange, morally and physically, a situation of mass killing. You can't begin with mass killings all at once. Mass killing is the last, small step."
Rupnow also discussed the involvement of doctors, or the "medicalization" of the process of killing.
"Medicalization is not just about medical experiments ... it's a cruel way of constructing the killing as some kind of a healing for the social body," he said. This situation, he argued, allowed the perpetrators of wartime cruelties to recognize that they were committing terrible acts, while still believing that it was for the greater good of their society.
Leonard Rubenstein, the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, emphasized the legal and moral ramifications of the changes the government has made in torture laws in the last five years, for doctors and the country.
Rubenstein showed how revisions in the law allowed doctors to become more involved in the interrogation process, even devising interrogation methods, all in violation of ethical standards that have been established, "since the 1970s."
Under new laws, treatment could be, "degrading, abusive, but not inhumane and therefore legal. And because it was legal, the doctors couldn't have done anything wrong," Rubenstein said.
Even new laws, such as the anti-torture amendments introduced by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have been of no avail, according to Rubenstein.
"The essential corrosion of institutions had become so deep that the law didn't have any impact," he said. "We thought this was a victory."
The last speaker, former army medical officer Brig. Gen. Stephen N. Xenakis, expressed what he saw as a problem of "dual loyalty" for military doctors; they can either listen to command, or follow their conscience and face punishment.
"In the end," he said, "we do what the political leadership tells us, or we resign, and they find someone else."
Ultimately, Xenakis placed the onus for change firmly on the government.
"We have to challenge our government, correct the course, and reverse the corrosion of values that has taken place over the past 5 years."
The panel was co-sponsored by the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding and the non-profit organization Physicians for Human Rights.
