1st Edition
The Clinical Witness Conflict, Catastrophe and Medical Testimony
Introduction: Witnessing Healthcare Professionals
Nicolas Barnett, Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams
Section 1: The Holocaust
1. The Status of Healthcare Workers in Deportation Testimonies
Nathalie Heinich
2. Bearing Witness to Inhumanity: Testimonies of Women Prisoner-Doctors who Survived Nazi Camps
Barbara Rylko-Bauer
3. A Typology of Auschwitz: Clinical Objectivity and Emotions in Miklós Nyiszli’s Memoir
Dominic Williams
4. On Avoiding Moral Injury: The Case of Dr. Elie Cohen
Monika Rice
Section 2: Witnessing Contemporary History
5. The role of medical records/testimonies regarding the atomic bombing experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Junko Kiriya and Taeko Kiriya
6. Witnessing The Norwegian Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the Korean War
Jan-Thore Lockertsen
7. Healing in the Din of History: Doctors Under the Khmer Rouge
Anne Yvonne Guillou
8. Bearing Witness to the Restless Dead after Massacres in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe
Shari Eppel
Section 3: Mental Health Professionals as Witnesses
9. Ebola and COVID-19 in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Oléa Balayulu Makila
10. Witnessing Professionals and Surviving Catastrophe: Robert Jay Lifton in Conversation with Nicolas Barnett, Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams
Robert Jay Lifton
11. The Politics of Witness and Ethical Action by Medical Professionals and Open Society Regarding War and Torture
Derek Summerfield
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)
Nicholas Chare
13. Five Figures of the Witness: The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony in Palestine
Didier Fassin
14. Testimony in a Time of Cholera: Healthcare After the 2010 Haiti Earthquake
Jeanty Fils Exalus
15. Bringing Back Biography: Medical témoignage beyond the biological among medical-humanitarian volunteers in the Egyptian uprising
Sophie Roborgh
Section 5: Responsibility to Bear Witness
16. Clinical Witnessing in Forensic Nursing Science
Virginia Lynch
17. Ways of Seeing: Testimony in Médecins sans Frontières (MSF)
Sara Chare
18. Witnessing the Worst Corporate Crime in History
Satinath Sarangi
19. The Nausea
Hans Husum
Coda
20. Coda: Reflections on Witnessing COVID-19
Nicolas Barnett
Biography
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).
