Volunteer Service From American Physicians During the Vietnam War.

This article draws on resources from the American Medical Association Archives on the Volunteer Physicians for Vietnam Program (1966-1973) to consider benefits and costs of immersion opportunities in medical education. Selected images and reports illuminate how such programs can influence both physicians-in-training and the environments in which they are immersed.

Vaunting the independent amateur: Scientific American and the representation of lay scientists.

This paper traces how media representations encouraged enthusiasts, youth and skilled volunteers to participate actively in science and technology during the twentieth century. It assesses how distinctive discourses about scientific amateurs positioned them with respect to professionals in shifting political and cultural environments. In particular, the account assesses the seminal role of a periodical, Scientific American magazine, in shaping and championing an enduring vision of autonomous scientific enthusiasms. Between the 1920s and 1970s, editors Albert G. Ingalls and Clair L. Stong shepherded generations of adult 'amateur scientists'. Their columns and books popularized a vision of independent non-professional research that celebrated the frugal ingenuity and skills of inveterate tinkerers. Some of these attributes have found more recent expression in present-day 'maker culture'. The topic consequently is relevant to the historiography of scientific practice, science popularization and science education. Its focus on independent non-professionals highlights political dimensions of agency and autonomy that have often been implicit for such historical (and contemporary) actors. The paper argues that the Scientific American template of adult scientific amateurism contrasted with other representations: those promoted by earlier periodicals and by a science education organization, Science Service, and by the national demands for recruiting scientific labour during and after the Second World War. The evidence indicates that advocates of the alternative models had distinctive goals and adapted their narrative tactics to reach their intended audiences, which typically were conceived as young persons requiring instruction or mentoring. By contrast, the monthly Scientific American columns established a long-lived and stable image of the independent lay scientist.

Failing to protect humanitarian workers: lessons from Britain and Voluntary Aid Detachments in the Second World War.

This paper draws on official records of international and British organizations, newspaper reports, and volunteer memoirs to study the failure to protect humanitarian workers in the Second World War. The Second World War saw a significant expansion in the use of air warfare and flying missiles and these technological advances posed a grave threat to civilians and humanitarian workers. In this context, the International Committee of the Red Cross advocated unsuccessfully to restrict air warfare and create safe hospital zones. The British Government grappled with the tension between military and humanitarian objectives in setting its bombardment policy. Ultimately, humanitarian principles were neglected in pursuit of strategic aims, which endangered civilians and left humanitarian workers particularly vulnerable. British Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses experienced more than six-fold greater fatality rates than civil defence workers and the general population. The lessons from failures to protect humanitarian workers in the face of evolutions in warfare remain profoundly relevant.

Western University (No. 10 Canadian Stationary Hospital and No. 14 Canadian General Hospital): a study of medical volunteerism in the First World War.

SUMMARY: The Canadian government depended on chaotic civilian volunteerism to staff a huge medical commitment during the First World War. Offers from Canadian universities to raise, staff and equip hospitals for deployment, initially rejected, were incrementally accepted as casualties mounted. When its offer was accepted in 1916, Western University Hospital quickly adopted military decorum and equipped itself using Canadian Red Cross Commission guidelines. Staff of the No. 10 Canadian Stationary Hospital and the No. 14 Canadian General Hospital retained excellent morale throughout the war despite heavy medical demand, poor conditions, aerial bombardment and external medical politics. The overwhelming majority of volunteers were Canadian-born and educated. The story of the hospital's commanding officer, Edwin Seaborn, is examined to understand the background upon which the urge to volunteer in the First World War was based. Although many Western volunteers came from British stock, they promoted Canadian independence. A classical education and a broad range of interests outside of medicine, including biology, history and native Canadian culture, were features that Seaborn shared with other leaders in Canadian medicine, such as William Osler, who also volunteered quickly in the First World War.

[The injured of the summer of 1914 and their stories]. / Les blessés de l'été 14 et le roman.

The situation of the French Military Health Service was particularly precarious at the beginning of the Great War. Contemporary novelists wished to expose the lies of propaganda and described without any complacency the disorganisation, the improvisation and the mistakes of the first weeks of the conflict. In this context they show the initiatives taken by civilians, especially the ladies from the aristocracy, to help the wounded. From the battlefield to the hospitals they describe the stations of the cross of the soldiers, those hoping for "la bonne blessure" and those who end up being amputated when alternatives could have been possible.

O INCAvoluntário e suas histórias: a força da solidariedade / The INCAvoluntário and its stories: the strengrt of solidarity / El INCAvoluntário y sus historias: la fuerza de la solidaridad

No início do século XX, o Brasil vê nascerem as primeiras preocupações sociais com o câncer. Tal inquietação, relacionada à ampliação do conhecimento médico sobre a doença e à intensificação de pesquisas científicas e ações assistenciais para o seu controle na Europa e nos Estados Unidos, deu origem às primeiras iniciativas contra a doença no país. Essas tiveram como base ações filantrópicas e atividades pontuais no âmbito do Estado e deixariam como frutos as primeiras instituições direcionadas ao alívio dos que sofriam com a doença. O desenvolvimento institucional do INCA e a busca incessante de seus profissionais por diferentes formas de ampliar e humanizar o tratamento de seus pacientes possibilitam o grande aperfeiçoamento de um conjunto de atividades baseadas numa forma específica de filantropia: o trabalho voluntário. Tendo como base a doação humanitária do trabalho, o voluntariado hoje ocupa um papel central na instituição, em consonância com o crescimento desse novo modo de ação humanitária, que ocorre hoje em diversas sociedades ocidentais, como forma de apanágio do sofrimento.

Blood Products and the Commodification Debate: The Blurry Concept of Altruism and the 'Implicit Price' of Readily Available Body Parts.

There is a widespread consensus that a commodification of body parts is to be prevented. Numerous policy papers by international organizations extend this view to the blood supply and recommend a system of uncompensated volunteers in this area--often, however, without making the arguments for this view explicit. This situation seems to indicate that a relevant source of justified worry or unease about the blood supply system has to do with the issue of commodification. As a result, the current health minister of Ontario is proposing a ban on compensation even for blood plasma--despite the fact that Canada can only generate 30 % of the plasma needed for fractionation into important plasma protein products and has to purchase the rest abroad. In the following, I am going to suggest a number of alternative perspectives on the debate in order to facilitate a less dogmatic and more differentiated debate about the matter. Especially in light of the often over-simplified notions of altruism and commodification, I conclude that the debate has not conclusively established that it would be morally objectionable to provide blood plasma donors with monetary compensation or with other forms of explicit social recognition as an incentive. This is especially true of donations for fractionation into medicinal products by profit-oriented pharmaceutical companies.