The Clinical Witness

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 human-made - 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, its emphasizes 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.

Nicolas Barnett is a critical care physician based at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He has over 20 years of experience working in the National Health Service. He has a longstanding interest in the medical humanities. Nicholas Chare teaches cultural and critical theory 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 an Assistant Professor of 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).

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 Nyiszli's 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 Frontières (MSF), 18. Witnessing the Worst Corporate Crime in History, 19. The Nausea , Coda, 20. Coda: Reflections on Witnessing COVID-19