Doctors Without Borders

In Renée C. Fox’s 2014 book Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins San Frontières, the author explores the ethos of the medical organization, shedding a candid light on its internal culture and its struggles to define and defend its conception of humanitarian action. Through blogs from field workers, numerous testimonies of staff, and extracts from internal gatherings, Doctors Without Borders reveals a side largely unknown to the public and rarely presented in bibliographies of humanitarianism. Rather than praise the heroism of aid workers or denounce the cynicism of a system that feeds on people’s suffering, Fox looks at the introspective nature of MSF’s world.