Note from the Publisher: This piece belongs to the Merion West Legacy series, referring to articles and poems published between 2016 up to Spring 2025.

Reckoning with Medicine’s Unseemly Past

Reckoning with Medicine’s Unseemly Past
(Victims of the Guatemala Syphilis Experiment. National Archives and Records Administration/Via bioethicsarchive.georgetown.edu)

“How does such an advanced nation and forward-looking profession embrace ‘medicalized mass murder’ and a philosophy calling for the ‘annihilation of life unworthy of living’? How did those who pledged to follow ‘the Hippocratic tradition of healers,’ they ask, ‘become killers’?”

Timeless reading in a fleeting world.

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