Medical torture

Medical torture

Medical torture describes the involvement of, or sometimes instigation by, medical personnel in acts of torture, either to judge what victims can endure, to apply treatments that will enhance agony, or as torturers in their own right. Medical torture overlaps with medical interrogation if it involves the use of professional medical expertise to facilitate interrogation or corporal punishment in the conduct of torturous human experimentation or in providing professional medical sanction and approval for the torture of prisoners. Medical torture also covers torturous scientific (or pseudo-scientific) experimentation upon unwilling human subjects.

Medical Torture In fiction

• Actor Michael Palin plays a medical torturer in Director Terry Gilliam's 1985 dark comedic dystopian film Brazil.
• In the film adaptation of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" the main character, Winston Smith, is subjected to medical torture by the thought police.
• Actor Gregory Peck plays Nazi medical torturer Josef Mengele in Director Franklin J. Schaffner's "The Boys from Brazil".
• Actor Laurence Olivier plays Nazi torturer dentist Christian Szell in Director John Schlesinger's 1976 "Marathon Man".
• The film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", starring Jack Nicholson, depicts abuse of psychiatric techniques including electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomy.
• In the popular series "24," various forms of medical torture (including hallucinogens and injections) are utilized to obtain confessions and information from high-threat terrorists being interrogated in the fictional Counter-Terrorist Unit (CTU) of the United States.
• In Anthony Burgess' book "A Clockwork Orange", Alex, the anti-hero of the book, undergoes a fictional medical torture program called 'The Ludovico Technique', in which he is given a nausea-inducing drug, strapped to a chair with his eyelids forced open and forced to watch hours of films of extreme violence and rape to condition him to associate feelings of nausea with rape and violence.
• The theme of the 2009 horror film "The Human Centipede" (First Sequence) is that of a sadistic, psychopathic retired surgeon torturing three people by surgically connecting them mouth to rectum, forcing the last two to swallow the excrement of the person in front of them and physically beating all three of them if they try to rebel or escape.
• The 2008 horror film "Autopsy" focused on an insane doctor who runs a hospital where victims are lured in and experimented with so that the doctor can find a cure for his wife's terminal disease.
• In the book "Dearly Devoted Dexter" by Jeff Lindsay, the central antagonist is a character nicknamed 'Dr. Danco' who surgically removes all body parts not necessary for life from his victims as what is revealed to be forfeits in a twisted game of "hangman", carrying out the operations with the victim conscious and watching the procedures in a mirror.
• The multi-perspective novel "The Sea and Poison" (Shusaku Endo, 1957; translated by Michael Gallagher) depicts the vivisection experiments performed by Japanese doctors on American soldiers during World War II. Kei Kumai's 1986 drama film "The Sea and Poison" is based on this book (original film title "Umi to Dokuyaku").
• Dr. Jane Payne, a character in the children's book "Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger", is a sadistic dentist who pulls more teeth than is necessary in order to get extra money.

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