NLM History Lecture - A Laboratory of Humanitarianism

Michael E. DeBakey Lecture in the History of Medicine: A Laboratory of Humanitarianism Scholarship on captivity in modern conflicts has mostly focused on its violent aspects and on the very real physical and mental suffering of prisoners of war. This presentation will instead show why the First World War provided a unique laboratory for experimenting with different kinds of humanitarian assistance to those experiencing prolonged incarceration and separation from their families. Building on Dr. Stibbe’s recently published research his talk will examine three different but overlapping approaches to humanitarian assistance: relief work, efforts to enforce and enhance existing international conventions, and pressures placed on captor nations to come to prisoner exchange agreements. The presentation will conclude by examining the legacy of these developments for cultural and medical understandings of wartime captivity in the inter-war period and beyond. Author: Matthew Stibbe, PhD, Professor of Modern European History, Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom, and 2019 NLM Michael E. DeBakey Fellow Air date: Thursday, May 5, 2022, 2:00:00 PM NLM History Talks promote awareness and use of NLM and related historical collections for research, education, and public service in biomedicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. The series also supports the commitment of the NLM to recognize the diversity of its collections—which span ten centuries, encompass a range of digital and physical formats, and originate from nearly every part of the globe—and to foreground the voices of people of color, women, and individuals of a variety of cultural and disciplinary backgrounds who value these collections and use them to advance their research, teaching, and learning. Learn more at https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/lectures/....