The Tuol Sleng Notebook Logged Experiments and Outlived Their Victims

A Khmer Rouge medical notebook sits in a Phnom Penh prison - how did medical training become an instrument of state harm?

The Tuol Sleng Notebook Logged Experiments and Outlived Their Victims

In this episode, we present the surviving Tuol Sleng administrative notebook and trace parallel instances where medical knowledge was repurposed by states across decades and continents. We ask how the institutions, laws, and clinical practices that should protect life instead authorized harm.

Person: Hermann Fischer-Hüllstrung Location: Tuol Sleng security prison, Phnom Penh Date: 1978 Topic: human experiments (pisaot menuh) Event: documented medical procedures recorded in an administrative notebook

- Khmer Rouge medical personnel recorded experiments on at least seventeen detainees in 1978 under the heading "pisaot menuh" (human experiments). - Post-war international frameworks (Nuremberg Code, Declaration of Geneva, Geneva Conventions, Declaration of Tokyo) set prohibitions that did not prevent abuses. - In New Zealand, 362 children admitted between 1972 and 1978 received unmodified electroconvulsive therapy without anesthesia as punishment rather than treatment. - Soviet psychiatrists used the diagnosis "sluggish schizophrenia" to commit and medicate political dissenters indefinitely with high-dose neuroleptics. - South African military hospitals conducted the Aversion Project, applying electric shock paired with images and coercive sex-reassignment procedures on conscripts.

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