“The physician is the natural attorney of the poor” was a slogan Rudolf Virchow, a wealthy German pathologist, politician and social medicine activist, helped popularise in the mid-nineteenth century. More than 100 years later, Frantz Fanon – a Martinican-born psychiatrist who resigned from his position in the French medical system in protest against French colonial violence in Algeria – expressed a less-idealised impression of the profession.Although the physician presents himself as “the doctor who heals the wounds of humanity”, he is in reality “an integral part of colonisation, of domination, of exploitation”, Fanon wrote.Doctors across the world are familiar with Virchow’s affirming portrait of ourselves as virtuous advocates for the oppressed. But based on the prevailing responses of American, European, and Israeli medical professionals to the US-backed genocide in Gaza, Fanon’s damning assessment of doctors’ complicity with state violence rings far truer.
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