M*A*S*H International

Communist troops were at Saigon's gate last April and shells were exploding everywhere, but a small band of doctors continued to treat patients at battered Gia Dinh Hospital. During a recent lull in Lebanon's civil war, a medical team entered Beirut and set up an emergency clinic in an isolated Moslem enclave which had been blockaded for nine months. In Guatemala last February, the ground was still trembling when a special task force of doctors arrived to care for victims of that country's disastrous earthquake.

These courageous doctors were all volunteers and members of an extraordinary Paris-based medical organization called Medecins Sans Frontieres--literally, doctors without borders. Created in 1971 by a handful of idealistic young French physicians who had served as volunteers in Biafra during the Nigerian civil war, M.S.F. membership has since grown to nearly 750 physicians and paramedics of more than a dozen nationalities, including Americans. Their basic credo: to offer medicine's healing hand to any part of the world where it may suddenly be needed.

Operating on a shoestring budget out of storefront headquarters near Paris' Gare de Lyon railroad station, M.S.F. has sent medical teams flying off to the most remote corners of the world. Almost as soon as it gets word of a medical emergency, M.S.F. responds. A duty officer at the cramped headquarters scans his file cards and quickly puts together an appropriate team that usually consists of a doctor, a surgeon and an anaesthetist, as well as nurses or paramedics. By telephone or telegraph, the volunteers are found wherever they happen to be in the world; travel and expense money to the site of the mission is provided by relief agencies, airlines or private donors. Special equipment, including surgical tools, resuscitation apparatus, vaccines and about 30 basic drugs--often contributed by pharmaceutical manufacturers--are packaged in advance and ready to go.

M.S.F. doctors are not paid unless they stay for more than three months (after which they usually get only about $100 a week), and receive no personal publicity; they are bound to the organization's code of anonymity. Nonetheless, leaving their practices in the hands of colleagues, many of the same doctors have responded repeatedly in crises.

Ironclad Rule. The teams live and eat with their patients, and often have to rough it in hostile terrain. When Peru's mountain dwellers showed reluctance to come to M.S.F.'s field hospitals after the 1974 quake, the doctors climbed the Andes by mule and horseback to reach the injured. By ironclad rule, they are scrupulously nonpartisan; no nation has ever rejected them for political reasons. In the Viet Nam, October and Angolan wars, M.S.F. offered help to all; the doctors themselves have so far sustained no casualties. They are also unfazed by the unexpected; after Nicaragua's 1972 quake, they found that their first duty was obstetrical: the tremors had induced premature labor in countless pregnant women.

M.S.F. prepares its volunteers for the special hazards of their service by holding evening courses at a Paris hospital in such subjects as tropical medicine, parasitology and treating war wounds. But experience itself is the best tutor--and reward. Said one veteran of Biafra, Beirut, Bangladesh and Peru: "You find yourself really living up to your medical vows, not just being a cog in a machine. You are continually improvising, and when you succeed, you feel you've really accomplished something."

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