To Bear Witness
Abstract
For more than forty-five years, Kevin Cahill has been helping to heal the world: as a leading specialist in tropical medicine and as a driving force in humanitarian assistance and relief efforts across the globe.
Physician, teacher, activist, diplomat, and advocate, Cahill has touched many lives and helped right many wrongs. In this book, he chronicles extraordinary achievements of compassion and commitment. Bringing together a rich selection of writings—essays, op-ed pieces, speeches, and other works, many out of print or hard to find—he crafts a fascinating self-portrait of a life devoted to others.
The writings reflect fully the range of Cahill’s passions. Reporting from places under siege—Lebanon, Somalia, Nicaragua, Libya, and Ireland—Cahill writes as a physician and activist working to restore lives wounded by land mines or threatened by violence and disease. Closer to home, there are his visionary statements from the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, powerful critiques of the politics of famine and public health, and programs for new forms of humanitarian assistance to transform health and human rights.
Looking back as the Bronx-born son of an Irish physician, he also touches on more personal—but no less passionate—concerns and on the impact on his life of the worlds of pain and suffering in which he has traveled.
