This study showed that challenges for emergency medical response during the Haiti Earthquake involved issues of accountability, professional ethics, standards-of-care, unmet needs, patient agency and expected outcomes for patients in such settings:

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Background Attacks on health care in armed conflict, including those on health workers, facilities, patients and transports, represent serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. Information about these incidents and their characteristics are available in myriad forms: as published research or commentary, investigative reports, and within online data collection initiatives. We review the research on attacks on health to understand what data they rely on, what subjects they cover and what gaps exist in order to develop a research agenda going forward. Methods and findings This study utilizes a systematic review of peer-reviewed to identify and understand relevant data about attacks on health in situations of conflict. We identified 1479 papers published before January 1, 2020 using systematic and hand-searching and chose 45 articles for review that matched our inclusion criteria. We extracted data on geographical and conflict foci, methodology, objectives and major themes. Among the included articles, 26 focused on assessment of evidence of attacks, 15 on analyzing their impacts, three on the legal and human rights principles and one on the methods of documentation. We analyzed article data to answer questions about where and when attacks occur and are investigated, what types of attacks occur, who is perpetrating them, and how and why they are studied. We synthesized cross-cutting themes on the impacts of these attacks, mitigation efforts, and gaps in existing data. Conclusion Recognizing limitations in the review, we find there have been comparatively few studies over the past four decades but the literature is growing. To deepen the discussions of the scope of attacks and to enable cross-context comparisons, documentation of attacks on health must be enhanced to make the data more consistent, more thorough, more accessible, include diverse perspectives, and clarify taxonomy. As the research on attacks on health expands, practical questions on how the data is utilized for advocacy, protection and accountability must be prioritized.

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Since the Biafran War, the Médecins sans frontières (MSF) and Médecins du Monde (MDM) movements have become the incarnation of modern Frenchinternationalism and universalism. These organisations have had a chequered and conflictual history. From the late 1970s the movements became increasingly associated with media developments, while its main protagonists became absorbed into politics. The Île-de-Lumière ship for Vietnam signalled a crucial turning point in the use of the media and in allying with traditional intellectual forces, while crises elsewhere in the early 1990s led to increased self-reflexivity. Using the key texts of this phase, this article analyses how these movements looked back at the 1930s, and how two traditions of French humanitarianism found an echo among French doctors, the first being the religious movements representing a Catholic tradition of humanitarianism, the second being the secular post-revolutionary tradition. Reconciling both traditions in humanitarian interventions, the 'French doctors' have developed a new universalism that transcends the right-left divide.

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The aim of this article is to carry out a preliminary analysis of issues relating to the types of violence that are directed against humanitarian medical missions.

This essay sheds new light on the supposedly familiar world of Victorian philanthropy by considering charity in relation to market regulation. Focusing on the “charity fraud,” we suggest that in the shaping of this exclusive and paradoxical marketplace, charities eagerly seized fraud denunciations to advertise and authenticate their legitimacy. This reflected the massive changes in the charitable world since the days of paternalist social relations and, paradoxically, illustrates the extremity of the problem facing the donating public: if one could not be entirely certain of a local charity, how could he or she discern between the national organizations that undertook fund-raising for international disasters? This contest for legitimacy and the exposure of fraud shaped a contested but oddly virtuous exchange market: by the turn of the twentieth century, charities not only published account sheets but debated them publicly, too.