In recent years, many health care professionals have been confronting the challenging chapters of their institutions’ history, as societies more broadly grapple with how to deal with past institutional trauma. Whether it is problematic medical experiments; abuses of authority; systematic patterns of neglect, discrimination, or racism; or funders with questionable sources of wealth, many institutions now have to reckon with their past.
Some of these transgressions will be addressed in courts. In other cases, institutions may be asked to offer substantial gestures of redress.