War Hospital A True Story of Surgery and Survival

A young physician-reporter chronicles the experiences of doctors and nurses in a besieged city, illuminating the passions, challenges, tragedies, and agonizing moral quandaries of practicing medicine in a war zone. 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. There the doctors faced the most intense professional, ethical, and personal predicaments of their lives. Drawing on extensive interviews, documents, and recorded materials she collected over four and a half years, doctor and journalist Sheri Fink tells the harrowing--and ultimately enlightening--story of these physicians and the three who try to help them: an idealistic internist from Doctors without Borders, who hopes that interposition of international aid workers will help prevent a massacre: an aspiring Bosnian surgeon willing to walk through mine-fields 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. 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? From War Hospital Clouds blow in and the evening sky turns dark. Within minutes, icy-cold raindrops have drenched them to their skin. Then actual ice begins to fall. Pieces of hail as big as walnuts crack the ground, the trees andIlijaz's head, momentarily disorienting him as he runs for shelter beneath the trees. Hail in the middle of the summer? This is the culmination of hell. In a while the hail stops, but the rain keeps coming. They line up again, dFink, Sheri is the author of 'War Hospital A True Story of Surgery and Survival', published 2003 under ISBN 9781586481131 and ISBN 1586481134.