The medical profession has given us a rich tradition of murderers, says theodore dalrymple |
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T he involvement of several doctors in the bomb plots in London and Glasgow seems to many people almost as heinous as the plots themselves. Is not medicine a healing profession, and are not doctors, wherever they come from, supposed to try to save human life whenever and wherever they can?
In fact, it is not altogether surprising that members of the medical profession have become terrorists.
On the whole, the German medical profession behaved very badly during the Nazi era, not only failing, with very few exceptions, to support their Jewish colleagues, but benefitting materially from their enforced retirement, and never making a collective protest against the regime. Many Japanese doctors also took part in experiments of an horrific and diabolically cruel nature on live human beings.
When doctors get into power as dictators, |
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| Che Guevara so loved humanity that he ordered the executions of hundreds of people |
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they usually display no more compunction than any other dictators. Papa Doc, for example, who had worked on research to eliminate tropical disease before he went into politics, was not known for his clemency to his opponents. Hastings Banda was no slouch at repression either.
Vera Figner was a Russian doctor who qualified in Zurich and was a great proponent of terrorism, eventually taking a large part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, an act that had such disastrous consequences for Russia and the world. Che Guevara (left), a doctor who never practised medicine for any length of time, so loved humanity that he ordered the executions of hundreds of people.
Terrorists rarely emerge from the most downtrodden, wretched or uneducated classes. Almost always they come from the striving professional and educated classes. And doctors are no more immune from utopian fantasies, or from the hatreds that provoke them, than any other group of educated people.
FIRST POSTED JULY 4, 2007
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