An intimate portrait of the renowned international humanitarian organization.

Winner of the PROSE Award for Excellence, Sociology and Social Work of the Association of American Publishers

Pioneering medical sociologist Renée C. Fox spent nearly twenty years conducting extensive ethnographic research within Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), a private international medical humanitarian organization that was created in 1971 and awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1999. Drawing on unprecedented access to MSF staff meetings, doctors, and field workers, Fox weaves a rich tapestry of the MSF experience with emerging and reemerging infectious diseases. Including vivid photographs of MSF operations, Doctors Without Borders explores the organization’s founding principles, distinctive culture, and inner struggles to realize more fully its “without borders” transnational vision.

Renée C. Fox is the Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Experiment Perilous: Physicians and Patients Facing the Unknown, In the Belgian Château: The Spirit and Culture of a European Society in an Age of Change, and In the Field: A Sociologist's Journey and the coauthor of The Courage to Fail: A Social View of Organ Transplants and Dialysis and Observing Bioethics