Dominic Williams – författare

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 humanmade – 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, it emphasises 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.

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 humanmade – 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, it emphasises 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.

In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando—the “special squads,” composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these “Scrolls of Auschwitz,” which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp’s liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

This book is the first to bring together analyses of the full range of post-war testimony given by survivors of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando were slave labourers in the gas chambers and crematoria, forced to process and dispose of the bodies of those who were murdered. They have been central to a number of key topics in post-war debates about the Shoah: collaboration, moral compromise and survival, resistance, representation, and the possibility of bearing witness. Their testimony however has mostly met with a reluctance to engage in depth with it. Moving from testimonies produced within the event, the Scrolls of Auschwitz and the Sonderkommando photographs, to testimonies given at trials and for video archives, and to the paintings of David Olère and the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, this book demonstrates the importance of their witnessing in the post-war memory of the Holocaust, and provides vital new insights into the questions of representation, memory, gender, and the Shoah.