For more than fifty years, Dr. Cahill has been helping to heal the world, as a leading specialist in tropical medicine and as a driving force in humanitarian assistance and relief efforts around the globe. In this revised and expanded edition, he chronicles extraordinary achievements of compassion and commitment. Bringing together a rich selection of writings, he crafts a fascinating memoir of a life devoted to others. The book includes front-line reports from places under siege—Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Nicaragua, Gaza, and Ireland; there are also visionary essays from the origins of the AIDS epidemic and landmine crises, and no less passionate concerns of his own experiences of pain and suffering—as well as of joy and beauty—in the worlds in which he has traveled. As the distinguished neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, M.D., notes in his endorsement, “These essays, by turns elegiac, lyrical, funny, tender, nostalgic, and vehemently impassioned, come together in an ongoing tapestry, a portrait of a dedicated physician who has dared to make a difference.”
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One: Locations
- The Middle East
- Beirut’s Smell of Death
- A Doctor’s Reflections on the Libyan Situation
- Gaza – Destruction and Hope
- Somalia
- For a U.S. Role in Somalia
- Palm Sunday in Somalia
- Starving Refugees Overwhelm Somalia
- A Somali Postscript
- Nicaragua
- The Nicaraguan Earthquake
- The Price for Differing with the U.S. Is Death
- Of Constitutions, Democracy, Medicine, and Diplomacy
- Holidays in Nicaragua
- Fasting and Medicine in Nicaragua
- Ireland
- A Perverse Silence
- Red Stains on the Emerald Isle: Can Only Blood Wash Them Out?
- A Deathless Dream
- The Descendants of the High Kings of Ireland
- Part Two: Academia
- New Realities, New Frontiers
- The Peculiar Élan
- The University and Revolution
- The Symbolism of Salamanca
- Grief and Renewal
- To Bind our Wounds
- Loaded Words
- Dreams and Travel
- A Necessary Balance
- A Dublin Department
- Is That All There Is?
- Part Three: Continuity
- Health on the Horn of Africa
- The Untapped Resource
- Irish Essays
- Threads for a Tapestry
- Famine
- The AIDS Epidemic
- A Bridge to Peace
- Imminent Peril
- A Framework for Survival
- Clearing the Fields
- Preventive Diplomacy
- Traditions, Values, and Humanitarian Action
- Technology for Humanitarian Action
- The Pulse of Humanitarian Assistance
- Even in Chaos
- More With Less
- Books by Kevin M. Cahill, M.D. cited in this Section
- Part Four: Personal
- God and My Life
- The Influence of Yeats
- On Being Short
- Suffering and Pain
- A Medical Student’s Impressions of India
- It Ain’t Necessarily So
- Romance and Reality
- To Bear Witness
- “For Your 65th”