Medical involvement in violence, especially torture, seem irreconcilable with the view of doctors as healers. However, throughout history, there have been instances where this fundamental principle has been neglected or completely ignored. Brutal treatments offers a detailed comparative assessment of two case studies where doctors became entangled in state-sponsored violence. The Kenya Emergency (1952-1960) and Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) are recognised as two bloody counterinsurgency campaigns where colonial security forces used torture and other human rights abuses to suppress anticolonial resistance. Although the extent and nature of this violence is well known, less attention has been paid to the role doctors and medicine played in supporting, overseeing, and sometimes leading it.
This book shines a light on the shadowy and uncomfortable aspects of the history of medicine. It places medicine and its practitioners within the wider social, economic and political milieu of the two colonies, revealing them to be deeply embedded social actors who had personal stakes in the colonial situation, the detainment of perceived enemies, and the concealment of abuse. Ultimately, these doctors were willing to lend their expertise to help diagnose the minds of the 'terrorists', to oversee their health while in detention, to monitor them during interrogation, and even to conceal evidence of abuse.
Brutal treatments makes a substantial and significant contribution to the history of medicine, the history of medical ethics and the history of colonialism, and will be of interest to scholars and students interested in the history of medicine, colonialism and ethics.