The antagonistic press conference

Monday, December 9, was a bone-chilling day. The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs arranged the press conference at the SAS Hotel in downtown Oslo. The room was overheated before we started, packed with more than two hundred journalists and physicians sitting and standing shoulder to shoulder. Chazov and I sat at a dais along with representatives of our global movement. 

When the press conference started, questions came in rapid succession. None were related to the nuclear arms race that threatened human existence. The questioners were working in unison and were focused on Soviet human rights abuses, Soviet psychiatry, and questions about the mistreatment of particular dissidents. We were now accustomed to being asked about everything but our work.

“None of the questions were related to the nuclear arms race that threatened human existence.”

We explained the need, despite vexing issues such as human rights, to work together with the Soviets to end the nuclear threat. We emphasized the importance of IPPNW as a single-issue organization and said that that if we had to resolve all other issues first, we would never have a dialogue on the nuclear threat.

It became evident that there was no interest in a reasoned exchange. Instead of presenting our case, we were shut out from the debate by venomous prosecutorial grilling that degenerated into shouted abuse.

“We have already filled the quota allotted to your people”

In the mid-20th century the Johns Hopkins Medical School was at the apogee for training doctors in the US. My matriculating there was a fluke. Every other medical school I had applied to rejected me because of my Jewish heritage. The dean of the Harvard Medical School made no bones about the matter. In an interview he told me outright, “We have already filled the quota allotted to your people.”

“In the hospital there were separate white and black wards, white and black toilets, white and black dining facilities. Even the water fountains were segregated.”

In numerous ways medical school presented a culture shock from which there was no ready recovery. The physical and psychological stresses grated less than the incessant, all-pervasive racism. I encountered apartheid South Africa in Baltimore. Blacks sat in the back of buses and streetcars. In the hospital there were separate white and black wards, white and black toilets, white and black dining facilities. Even the water fountains were segregated. There were no black doctors, medical students, or nurses.

Having barely escaped the Holocaust, I was sensitized to the lethality of prejudice. The United States was in the midst of a life-and-death struggle against the penultimate purveyors of racism and anti-Semitism. Americans were heralding the war’s aim of promoting fundamental human values. Yet, right in our heartland these very precepts were being egregiously violated. For me, silence was incongruent with being a moral human being.

The “unique torture” of bed rest

[In the early 1950s] I began a cardiovascular fellowship under the mentorship of Dr. Samuel A. Levine at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now the Brigham and Women’s Hospital) in Boston. At the time, the major challenge in hospital-based cardiology was dealing with the steady inflow of patients with acute heart attacks. Care was largely palliative: to relieve chest pain, to prevent blood clots, to ease the breathlessness and edema provoked by a failing heart muscle. Patients were confined to strict bed rest for four to six weeks. Sitting in a chair was prohibited. They were not allowed to turn from side to side without assistance. During the first week, they were fed. Moving their bowels and urinating required a bedpan. For the constipated, which included nearly every patient, precariously balancing on a bedpan was agonizing as well as embarrassing.

“Visiting Martians, witnessing this travail, might have judged the scene differently, regarding hospitals as prisons where inmates were subjected to a unique form of torture.”

Dr. Bernard Lown

Because world events might provoke unease, some physicians prohibited their patients from listening to the radio or reading a newspaper. Visits by family members were limited. Since recumbency provoked much restiveness and anxiety, patients required heavy sedation, which contributed to a pervasive sense of hopelessness and depression. Around one in three patients died. Not surprisingly, many died from blood clots migrating to their lungs.

In addition to the pain stemming from the heart attack and the accompanying fear of dying, patients had to cope with the torment of isolation, the indignity of infantilization, and the unbearable distress of excessive bed rest. Physicians convinced themselves and their patients that complete bed rest was the price of survival. Visiting Martians, witnessing this travail, might have judged the scene differently, regarding hospitals as prisons where inmates were subjected to a unique form of torture.