Raised on a diet of broken biscuits
I use this place as a trivial kind of commonplace book, to collect things which interest/edify/amuse or attract me, along with some journalish musings.
Surgeon Bruno Dehaye, M.D., adjusts a lamp in the operating room at the Kompong Cham refugee camp.
“It is our duty as humans and doctors 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 800 physicians, nurses, and medics to alleviate the world’s crises every year.
photographer: Sebastião Salgado - Eastern Cambodia, circa 1975-1979
from The Face of Mercy - A Photographic History of Medicine at War
Blinded British Solders depend on each other as they learn to navigate the grounds of St. Dunstan’s Villa in London, a home founded by American banker Otto Kahn.
Photograph by Jimmy Hare, London, England, circa 1915
From The Face of Mercy - A Photographic History of Medicine at War
From Hougton Mifflin
On Wednesday, March 24, 2010, Tim O’Brien met with students from Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. He was joined by Nate Fick, the author of One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, to discuss writing and their mutual combat experiences (O’Brien served in Vietnam, Fick in Iraq and Afghanistan).
After O’Brien read a passage from The Things They Carried, the two authors answered questions from Cardozo’s students—and other questions submitted online from students across the United States. Their conversation was broadcast live over the Internet, where it was viewed by more than 300 schools—and is now available for viewing at any time.
But we fight for life,
we fight, they say, for breath,
so what good are your scribblings?
this - we take them with us
beyond death; Mercury, Hermes, Thoth
invented the script, letters, palette;
the indicated flute or lyre-notes
on papyrus or parchment
are magic, indelibly stamped
on the atmosphere somewhere
forever; remember O Sword,
you are the younger brother, the latter-born,
your Triumph, however exultant,
must one day be over,
in the beginning
was the Word.
