Force-feeding: in perspective
Forcible feeding of hunger strikers was used at the beginning of the 20th century on the "suffragettes", in England, as depicted in the poster above, on those women who went on hunger strike to protest against the denial of women's right to vote.
Force-feeding was also used in England and Germany during the 70's, notably in England on Irish Republican prisoners, and in Germany with members of the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion). When the World Medical Association passed its landmark declaration, the 1975 Declaration of Tokyo on "Torture", these situations were duly considered in the writing up of (then) article 5, which specifically mentions that prisoners should not be artificially fed.
The reason for including this article on hunger strikes in a Declaration which in fact is about medical participation in torture can be found in the "travaux préparatoires" to the Tokyo Declaration. The reasoning was, that if a prisoner was being tortured, and the only way he or she had to try to escape from torture was to go on hunger strike, it was certainly not the role of the doctor to artificially feed the prisons (let alone force-feed him!) so as to send him or her back to torture.