Over the last two centuries, western medical authorities have engaged in many political crusades dressed up in the disguise of medical research.

Benjamin Rush, MD (1746-­1813), was a signer of the American Declaration of Independence, Dean of the Medical School at the University of Pennsylvania and the "Father of American Psychiatry". At the time Rush lived, many people were unhappy with the political structure of the United States - slavery, voting restricted to white property-owning men, etc. In response to the public outcry for a more democratic society , Rush invented a mental illness called "anarchia", a "form of insanity" he used to label those who sought democratic changes.

Dr Rush also explained that coloured people all suffered from a disease he called Negritude. There was no cure; but to prevent the spread of the “disease”, black people needed to be kept separate from normal healthy ( white) people. Hence the medical profession provided legitimacy for racial segregation and apartheid.

In 1851, Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a prominent Louisiana physician invented a “mental disorder” peculiar to Negro slaves. Drapetomania was a disease causing slaves to run away from their owners! Planters and overseers were encouraged to use whipping as the primary “treatment” for the disease, though amputation of the toes was also resorted to. Not surprisingly, Dr. Cartwright was also a leading thinker in the pro-slavery movement.

Although slavery was abolished in the 1860s, Dr Rush's policy of segregation continued for another 100 years till the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Black Americans were denied the opportunity to get a decent education or a decent job for one and a half centuries, largely because of these pronouncements by affluent white doctors projecting their prejudice onto a then-powerless minority in the guise of “medical” opinion.

Walter Freeman pioneered the trans-orbital (through the eye) lobotomy, which he literally performed with an ice pick. In 1948 Freeman performed his most famous transorbital lobotomy when he hammered his ice pick into the head of the movie star and radical political activist Frances Farmer. She rebelled all her life against every form of authority, and despite her success in Hollywood, and on Broadway, found herself at age 34 in the Western State Hospital ... notorious for its dreadful conditions, institutional violence, rape, and the regular punishment of uncooperative patients.

Frances Farmer 's openly communist sympathies, and aggression towards officialdom had offended far too many people for them to give up without 'curing' her. After giving a brief lecture to the assembled crowd on the wonders of the ice pick lobotomy's amazing potential for controlling society's misfits, viz. schizophrenics, homosexuals, communists, etc. - Dr Freeman went to work. That year he was elected president of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.

In the 1950s in New Orleans, black prisoners were used for psychosurgery experiments which involved electrodes being implanted into the brain. The experiments were conducted by psychiatrist Dr. Robert Heath from Tulane University and an Australian psychiatrist, Dr. Harry Bailey, who boasted in a lecture to nurses 20 years later that the two psychiatrists had used blacks because it was "cheaper to use Niggers than cats because they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals."

As recently as the late 1960s, a number of medical experts suggested that urban violence was due to "brain dysfunction” and recommended the use of psychosurgery (lobotomy) to prevent it. Of course, it was blacks and poor whites in the ghettos of large cities who were the intended recipients of such therapy.

Right up till the last few decades, women were excluded from many professions on the basis of their 'hysterical temperament' (a convenient condition invented by men). Condescending male doctors wrote lengthy articles explaining how women thought, pointing out that research proved women had smaller brains and were therefore unsuited to professional occupations, and among things assured us that “decent christian women do not enjoy sex! Domestic violence against women was ignored or trivialised; an article in the Archives of General Psychiatry saw the husband's aggressive behavior as "filling the masochistic needs of the wife and to be necessary for the wife's equilibrium."

The same medical experts justified the persecution and criminalisation of homosexual men by labeling them as mentally ill. For decades, gay men were indoctrinated with self-loathing propaganda by pyschiatrists who used electric shock and nausea-inducing drugs to treat them. Many were persuaded to enter into doomed marriages, because doctors assured them that having children would fix the problem. Although the medical profession finally removed homosexuality from their list of 'diseases' in 1973, gay teenagers still get put into psychiatric facilities against their will because their orientation doesn't fit nicely with the prejudices of their parents. And there are still psychiatrists eager to inflict their personal bias on vulnerable patients, in the guise of 'therapy'.

All of these politically-motivated disease theories were only abandoned or toned down when their victims collectively challenged the validity of the arguments, and fought the arrogant medical authorities that had invented these conveniently self-serving theories.

Medical associations in the western world are doctors' unions and are essentially political in nature. They have assisted in the promotion of racism, discrimination, and persecution of minorities. Individual members of those medical associations generally were not (and are not) “evil” people, and no doubt genuinely believed that their views were good for society. But the suffering they have inflicted on the innocent is equally appalling, whether committed out of good intention or bad.

Sadly, the medical ruling class has learned little from their past wrong-doings. Their political power games continue; they have simply moved on to a different soft target.

The National Health & Medical Research Council published a paper in 1994 arguing that boxing should be banned. Yet it offered no compelling evidence to support the conclusion. The report was written by an opponent of boxing as a political weapon against boxing. Because it was endorsed and published by the NHMRC, many people imagined that it must be based on authoritative research. Sadly, it was not a piece of scientific work, merely a recitation of anti-boxing propaganda, a shabby attempt to con the community.

The NHMRC later rescinded their publication, stating that "Rescinded publications are publications that no longer represent the Council's position on the matters contained therein. This means that the Council no longer endorses, supports or approves these rescinded publications." As a taxpayer, you might ask why the paper was ever approved in the first place, and why taxpayers' money was wasted to fund this unscientific tripe.

Medical associations like the AMA are free to express disapproval of boxing or anything else if they so wish. But attempts to disguise their ideological bias behind a pretence of objectivity or medical concern are dishonest and contemptible.

Copyright Tony Whelan 2003-2007. This article may be reproduced only by permission of the author.