Surgeon Bruno Dehaye, M.D., adjusts a lamp in the operating room at the Kompong Cham refugee camp, where Cambodian patient Heng Chu has come to flee the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot - under which an estimated one million Cambodians died.
“It is our duty as humans and doctors,” say the founders of Médecins Sans Frontières, “to assist and bear witness for peoples in danger of death, whether their governments approve or not.” In countries where basic health care is hard to come by even in peacetime, the care of the wounded is an immense challenge during war. Toward this end a small group of French doctors banded together in 1971 under the name Médecins Sans Frontières - Doctors Without Borders. The organization now sends some eight hundred physicians, nurses, and medics to alleviate the world’s crises every year.
Sebastião Salgado - Eastern Cambodia, circa 1975-1979
from The Face of Mercy - A Photographic History of Medicine at War
