His experience typified the Federal government’s lack of preparedness in wartime. Had Keen received an adequate briefing before battle, he would still have been left frustrated with a medical infrastructure unchanged in its essentials since the Mexican War of the 1840s. Keen later wrote, “My experience in this battle is a good illustration of the utter disorganization, or rather want of organization, of our entire army at the beginning of the war.”
Hearing that the Confederates were about to overrun the makeshift hospital, Keen’s patient, a soldier with a fractured humerus from a Minié ball (a powerful new rifled bullet), jumped up and ran for the woods, his bandage unraveling from his arm as he went. During the entire engagement, I never received a single order.” Inside a church he and fellow soldiers placed two boards on boxes in front of a pulpit for an operating table. “It was an exceedingly hot day, and we marched and halted in the thick dust under a broiling sun until about noon. Less than three weeks later, and with only nine months of medical training, Keen stood clueless, in his blue uniform with the green sash of a medical officer, near the battlefield at Bull Run in Virginia. Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (PublicAffairs), is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina.A few months after the Civil War began, on July 4, 1861, a group of patriotic young volunteers stood in the shadow of the Capitol, waiting to be sworn into the Union Army on a 90-day enlistment. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, she received her M.D. Her story “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” co-published by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, chronicled decisions made by the medical staff of one New Orleans hospital in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina.įink is a fellow at the New America Foundation. Most recently, her coverage of the 2012 hurricane season and its effects on the health care systems of New York City and New Orleans won the Mike Berger Award from Columbia Journalism School and the beat reporting award from the Association of Health Care Journalists in 2013. Sheri Fink’s reporting has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Overseas Press Club Lowell Thomas Award, among other journalism prizes. 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?ĭr. There the doctors faced the most intense professional, ethical, and personal predicaments of their lives.ĭrawing 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 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. 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. From Sheri Fink, author of Five Days at Memorial, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
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