BMJ  2004;328 (21 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7437.0-g

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Lessons from medicine's shameful past

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In a week when we look to the future of human cloning, (pp 415, 421) we also look back at the lessons that medicine should learn from its past.

Almost 30 years ago, in Limits to Medicine, Ivan Illich wrote: "Medicine undermines health not only through direct aggression against individuals but also through the impact of its social organisation against the total milieu." He referred to this as social iatrogenesis, and two papers in this week's BMJ illustrate this phenomenon uncomfortably well (pp 427, 429).

"I felt totally bewildered that my entire emotional life was being written up in the papers as utter filth and perversity," confesses Male 1, one of 29 people in the United Kingdom who received "treatment" to change their sexual orientation in the 1960s and 1970s. People received treatment between 13 and 40 years of age, mostly in NHS hospitals. The . . . [Full text of this article]

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