Prescribing Peaceful Progress

Photograph by Keith Lanpher

Medical care in many parts of the world often falls short of the standards typical in industrialized countries. The problem sometimes involves lack of access to sophisticated medical equipment or procedures, but can also be as simple as inadequate training in modern medical techniques.

Since 1984, health-care workers from the United States and elsewhere have traveled abroad under the auspices of a Norfolk, Va., charity called Physicians for Peace, to treat patients while also helping to train medical workers. To date, volunteer doctors, nurses, and others have made more than 200 medical missions to some 30 countries.

Last year alone, medical teams specializing in such areas as burn trauma, cardiology, infectious disease, plastic surgery, and prosthetics visited more than a dozen countries, including China, Cuba, Egypt, Haiti, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, and Turkey.

The charity’s founder, Charles E. Horton, a plastic surgeon who retired last year at age 74, believes that such medical-outreach missions can promote peace as well as health. “By coordinating teams of volunteer doctors from all over the world to visit countries in need, we are promoting friendship and breaking down barriers of distance, race, and location,” he says. Some missions, for example, have included both Israeli and Palestinian doctors.

Here, Victor Davis, a plastic surgeon from New Mexico, examines a young burn victim in Yemen while also instructing local doctors in modern burn-relief protocols.