This unique, interdisciplinary book critically examines the important roles that witness accounts from healthcare professionals have played in testifying to historical instances of genocide, mass killing, epidemic disease and natural disaster over the past century.
This unique, interdisciplinary book critically examines the important roles that witness accounts from healthcare professionals have played in testifying to historical instances of genocide, mass killing, epidemic disease and natural disaster over the past century. Knowledge and perceptions of many major disasters natural and humanmade have been shaped by witness accounts provided by doctors, nurses and other medical practitioners.
Bookended by two key events in the modern history of medicine, the Holocaust and the COVID-19 pandemic, this original volume engages with topics including the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and the Korean War. Drawing on a multidisciplinary selection of leading scholars and healthcare practitioners, and discussing a wide range of media, it emphasises mental and physical health, highlights the ethical challenges and moral stresses these terrible events can pose and assesses the ways in which the testimonies of healthcare professionals are qualitatively different from other forms of witness.
This wide-ranging, volume explores issues and themes relevant to medical humanities, history of medicine, peace and conflict studies, narrative medicine, humanitarian healthcare, healthcare ethics, trauma studies and global health. It is an essential contribution for all healthcare practitioners, aid workers and academics interested in these fields.
Introduction: Witnessing Healthcare Professionals, Section 1: The
Holocaust ,
1. The Status of Healthcare Workers in Deportation Testimonies,
2. Bearing Witness to Inhumanity: Testimonies of Women Prisoner-Doctors who
Survived Nazi Camps,
3. A Typology of Auschwitz: Clinical Objectivity and
Emotions in Miklós Nyiszlis Memoir,
4. On Avoiding Moral Injury: The Case of
Dr. Elie Cohen, Section 2: Witnessing Contemporary History,
5. The role of
medical records/testimonies regarding the atomic bombing experience in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
6. Witnessing The Norwegian Mobile Army Surgical
Hospital in the Korean War ,7. Healing in the Din of History: Doctors Under
the Khmer Rouge,
8. Bearing Witness to the Restless Dead after Massacres in
Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, Section 3: Mental Health Professionals as Witnesses,
9. Ebola and COVID-19 in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
10. Witnessing
Professionals and Surviving Catastrophe: Robert Jay Lifton in Conversation
with Nicolas Barnett, Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams ,
11. The Politics
of Witness and Ethical Action by Medical Professionals and Open Society
Regarding War and Torture, Section 4: Communication and Politics,
12. We
Murder to Attest: Conservation Medicine, Environmental Disaster and Bearing
Witness to the Effects of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on Eastern Oysters
(Crassostrea virginica),
13. Five Figures of the Witness: The Humanitarian
Politics of Testimony in Palestine,
14. Testimony in a Time of Cholera:
Healthcare After the 2010 Haiti Earthquake,
15. Bringing Back Biography:
Medical témoignage beyond the biological among medical-humanitarian
volunteers in the Egyptian uprising, Section 5: Responsibility to Bear
Witness,
16. Clinical Witnessing in Forensic Nursing Science ,
17. Ways of
Seeing: Testimony in Médecins sans Frontičres (MSF),
18. Witnessing the Worst
Corporate Crime in History,
19. The Nausea , Coda,
20. Coda: Reflections on
Witnessing COVID-19
Nicolas Barnett is a critical care physician based at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He has over twenty years of experience working in the National Health Service. He has an interest in the medical humanities.
Nicholas Chare is Professor of Art History in the Department of History of Art, Film and Audiovisual Studies at the Université de Montréal. He is the co-author (with Dominic Williams) of Matters of Testimony (2016) and The Auschwitz Sonderkommando (2019) and the co-editor (with Valérie Bienvenue) of Animals, Plants and Afterimages (2022).
Dominic Williams is Assistant Professor in History at Northumbria University. He is the co-author (with Nicholas Chare) of Matters of Testimony (2016) and The Auschwitz Sonderkommando (2019) and the co-editor (with Sarah Cushman and Joanne Pettitt) of The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau (2025).
