Baiev, a refugee physician presently living in Boston, recounts how the sufferings of the Chechens continue today since they began their quest for independence from the former Soviet Union. For barbarism and cruelty, Stalin's deportation of the Chechens during the 1940s is unmatched. Fink, a New York-based physician and writer who has worked in the Balkans, Africa, and Iraq, confronts the ethics of war and medicine, asking whether medical neutrality is possible in the face of atrocities, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. Fink's book is set against the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict, in the besieged city of Srebrenica, and its cast of characters are the young doctors (no surgeons) and other health personnel and their patients who endured every imaginable affliction of modern war in brutal conditions similar to those suffered by soldiers during the U.S. ReviewsThe common thread of these two books is doctors in war. from Stanford University, undertook additional training in emergency medicine at Harvard, and has worked in the Balkans, the north Caucasus, southern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Published: United States, 23 November 2004ĭimensions: 14 x 3.1 x 20.8 centimeters (0.63 kg)Ībout the AuthorSheri Fink is a physician and writer based in New York who has worked with the humanitarian aid organization International Medical Corps in conflict and disaster zones around the world. With limited resources and a makeshift hospital overflowing with patients, how can these doctors decide who to save and who to let die? Will their duty to treat patients come into conflict with their own struggle to survive? And are there times when medical and humanitarian aid ironically prolong war and human suffering rather than helping to relieve it? Drawing on extensive interviews, documents, and recorded materials she collected over four and a half years, physician-journalist Sheri Fink tells the harrowing-and ultimately enlightening-experiences of three characters: an idealistic physician from Doctors without Borders, who hopes that interposition of international physicians will help prevent a massacre an aspiring Bosnian surgeon willing to walk through minefields to reach the civilian wounded and a Serb doctor on the opposite side of the front line with the army that is intent on destroying his former colleagues. The war zone spawned the most intense professional, ethical, and personal predicaments these physicians ever faced. In April 1992, a handful of young physicians, not one of them a surgeon, was trapped along with 50,000 men, women, and children in the embattled enclave of Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
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