History of medical ethics & military medicine, with a focus on the Somalia affair
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ethical considerations are at the forefront of medical practice.This presents challenges for military physicians who have to abide by two potentially conflicting professional obligations: those stated in the Hippocratic Oath, which prioritize the patient, and the professional responsibility to the military hierarchy and command structure, which places the success of the mission first.The idea of "mixed agency" is of particular interest at a time when terrorism is of global concern, as it highlights many ethical dilemmas and failures.Considering the violations of human rights occurring around the world and the ethical obligations of physicians to act as advocates for health and humanity, it is important to question whether military physicians, sworn to uphold their missions, can and should betray their superiors to the government or the public to reveal military atrocities.In this paper, we will use a case-study approach to probe this question from an historical perspective, focusing on one military physician who, exposed to war crimes, blew the whistle.We will focus on the case of Dr. Barry Armstrong who, in 1993, revealed a military cover-up regarding the death of a Somali man at the hands of Canadian peacekeeping soldiers.Dr. Armstrong examined the man, determined that a murder had taken place and, when he saw that the complicity of the Canadian soldiers involved was minimized, he exposed the murder.This action ultimately led to a Royal Commission investigation which caused the military to lose a great deal of support among the Canadian public.Dr. Armstrong faced consequences both directly and indirectly due to his role in this scandal and its aftermath.In focusing on this case, we will examine both positive and negative outcomes of whistleblowing.In doing so, we shall also examine the significance of whistle blowing in the history of military medicine and medical ethics and point to potential areas for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".