Medicine beyond frontiers

These days, news of a suicide bomb going off in Iraq and killing innocent people is nothing new. It is predictable, almost expected. Harsh, but true. But how many of us stop to consider just what day to day life is like for the living—the daily survivors—who must endure the ongoing fear, pain, and terror? What of the patients who have been deprived of proper treatment and drugs since sanctions were imposed after the Gulf war back in the 1990s? What about the doctors and other healthcare professionals forced to flee the country, only to return to a city liberated yet devastated of resources. And le's not forget the students, their initial ambitious dreams left tattered now by a succession of sanctions, the crippling effects of a brutal regime, and the chaos of foreign occupation and terrorist activity in the aftermath of war.

To discover just how different the perspective is from a student on the other side of the war on terror, I spoke to medical students studying in London and in Baghdad. Ahmed Saffa, a final year medical student at Baghdad University, told me that “it is indeed hard to concentrate on studies.” Only now is he beginning to reconcile himself to the fact that last December, the acting dean of the medical faculty of Baghdad University, Dr Hassan Al-Rubaiee, was assassinated. There seems no apparent reason—he was not even linked to the government. What did that make students such as Ahmed feel? “Anger. This wasn't just anyone—a prominent physiologist, an influential figure, and one of the most respected of professors in …