Torture & Ill-treatment: an introduction for medics
Reflecting on his years in a Siberian prison camp, the nineteenth century novelist and Russian dissident Fyodor Dostoevsky had an epiphany: ‘The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons’.¹ Standards change with the times but, certainly, no-one could reasonably conclude that the terrible things he experienced – including mock execution, continual shackling, appalling sanitary conditions and witnessing severe beatings – were civilised. And things don’t change easily: two centuries on, nations with veneers of civility continue to bash out the same old brutality behind bars. The only difference is that modern-day survivors are dispersing across the globe. Consequently, every healthcare professional now needs to know about torture and ill-treatment. Yet there is a gaping void under the section ‘torture’ on medical undergraduate library shelves.
This book was conceived in 2018. After examining a telefono victim’s ears, I was struggling to convey my findings to a non-medical colleague. We agreed that an introductory medical textbook would come in handy. ‘You should write one!’ His joke gave me the idea but my busy schedule and the need to pitch it squarely at an entry level were definite limiting factors. The solution to both these problems appeared later in the year during our annual Medics & Justice course, a special study project provided for medical students at the University of Leeds. Keen to discover more about the gruesome subject to which I’d just introduced them, several of my students volunteered to write whilst they researched – and so we started down the road to producing a peer-written textbook.
The baby we have birthed is a collaboration between generalism and specialism. Non-experts of many faiths and none have written the chapters, each of which stands alone. I, a doctor of Christian faith possessing a degree of expertise in the medical sequelae of torture and ill-treatment, have had the excitement of overseeing the project and watching the chapters roll in. And we are now in the process of editing and publishing it, chapter by chapter. This partnership approach is very much in keeping with Integritas Healthcare’s modus operandi of deploying enthusiastic healthcare professional volunteers alongside seasoned experts in the provision of holistic offender healthcare to detainees of all faiths and none.
So soon we will have a textbook to put on library shelves. My prayer is that it will not gather dust but instead be picked up and read. By its very nature, learning about torture is distasteful. People differ in how they react to such material. To mitigate against the risk of vicarious trauma, we have included a specific chapter about this complication and commissioned expressionless illustrations. But regardless of whether you find this book’s contents distressing, read it you should. Quoting political prisoner Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer who wrote from his World War II prison cell, ‘We must learn to regard people… in the light of what they suffer’.²
Dr Rachael Pickering, Editor & Medical Director of Integritas Healthcare
References:
1: Dostoevsky, F. The House of the Dead. 1862
2: Bonhoeffer, D. Letters and Papers from Prison. 1962