MONDAY, 4.30PM
STEVE Biko’s widow Ntsiki and brother Khaya listened impassively on Tuesday as a doctor apologised to them for the failure of his colleagues to treat the activist’s head injuries before his death in police custody in 1977.
Presenting to a special truth commission hearing on the medical profession’s role in apartheid human rights abuses, University of Cape Town pharmacology head Professor Peter Folb apologised directly to Biko’s family, saying that his case had raised serious ethical issues that the medical profession is still addressing.
Although an inquest magistrate found there was a prima facie case of professional misconduct or negligence against the district surgeons who examined Biko, Folb said the SA Medical and Dental Council took no action against the doctors. “That decision was ratified by the full council [of the SAMDC]. The Medical Association of SA, after a perfunctory examination of the ethical issues, declared that the SAMDC had been correct in its findings.”
Folb said it was only after a group of doctors brought a supreme court action that the SAMDC launched an inquiry into the conduct of district surgeons Benjamin Tucker and Ivor Lang, in which Tucker was found guilty of disgraceful conduct and Lang of improper conduct. Tucker was suspended from the medical register for three months, but the sentence was suspended for two years. Lang was cautioned and reprimanded by the SAMDC.
Folb said the Biko case illustrated the “abject acceptance” by individual doctors and the medical profession of interference in their duties by the state and the police. “Was this an abberation in an otherwise proud if not excellent profession or was it inevitable? The truth was that it was the latter,” said Folb. “It was the culmination of apartheid discrimination in health facilties, the failure of the medical profession to respond to the banning of colleagues and the lack of training … in medical ethics.”