Past Events
September 4, 2007
Reception for X-ray Art Exhibit
About the exhibit:
From September 4-15 the Radiology Interest Group, co-sponsored by the Stanford Medical Student Association and the School of Medicine, among other groups, will be hosting an exhibit entitled "Inside Terrorism: the X-ray Project." The exhibit will be held in the Fairchild Auditorium, and there will be an opening reception on September 4 from 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
This exhibit uses X-rays and CT-scans of the victims of terrorist attacks from hospitals in Jerusalem to explore complex social issues surrounding terrorism. The School sought to be thoughtful in its review of this project and is sensitive to various points of view of this topic, especially as it manifests itself in the Middle East. However, terrorism is a worldwide phenomenon that knows no boundaries. While the images in this exhibit are taken from Jerusalem hospitals, the radiographs and CT-scans cannot distinguish race, religion, age, or sex. As such they represent the broad cross-section of people who, tragically, are the targets of terrorist attacks, such as commuters on the London subway system and on the trains in Madrid, celebrants at a wedding in Amman, Jordan and at a bat mitzvah in Hadera, Israel, little kids eating pizza, tourists in Bali and Egypt, people praying in churches and mosques and synagogues. Because terrorism transcends geographic as well as religious, ethnic and societal borders, the School supports this exhibit, and I encourage you to see it while it is at Stanford. More information about the exhibit can be found as www.x-rayproject.org.
In addition to awakening our knowledge about the consequences of terrorism through efforts like the X-Ray Project, the medical profession has also had to confront the role of physicians as terrorists in light of the horrendous events that recently occurred in the UK -- where doctors were responsible for acts of terrorism. As pointed out by a perspective piece in the August 16th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (2007;357:635-637) entitled When Doctors Become Terrorists by Dr. Simon Wessely (see: content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/357/7/635), these awful experiences are not new. Indeed, doctors have played a role in past and recent terrorist activities, forcing us all to confront our roles and be aware of the possibility of crossing the line of humanism and professionalism. As Wessely notes, "An idealistic doctor can indeed become fixated on disease and its eradication, and there are times when even obsessive single-mindedness can serve a useful purpose. But danger lurks if that single-mindedness is not tempered by empathy for the plight of the individual. If the doctors now in custody are indeed judged to have planned mass murder on the streets of London, this is a failure not of medicine but of humanity.
