Doctors Without Borders

Borders without Doctors.

“WHERE WERE YOU? Andy has asked to see you several times,” my friend Karen (one of our nurses) greeted me as I walked into our Palliative Care Unit. “Why? What is bothering him? Is he in pain?” “No! Just wants to see you, I guess. He is transitioning you know . . . ” Transitioning is a euphemism for active dying often used on our unit. “Have you called his family yet?” I asked, knowing full wel...

Doctors Without Answers: Limits, Challenges, and Dilemmas of Humanitarian (Bio)medicine, and Doctors Without Borders

An anesthesiologist in Liberia: my experience with Doctors Without Borders.

Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis

The politics of life and death is explored from the perspective of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans frontières [MSF]), an activist nongovernmental organization explicitly founded to respond to health crises on a global scale. Following the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, I underline key intersections between MSF’s operations that express concern for human life in the midst of...

Physiologists without borders.

Once upon a time, a handful of North American physiologists decided to create a social scientific network and called it the American Physiological Society (APS). Fast forward 125 years to the present and we find that APS has grown to 10,500 members, over a dozen research and review journals, a yearly budget of nearly $18 million, and an annual meeting that attracts over 10,000 scientists worldw...