I remember appealing for help from the Macedonian Health Ministry, saying, you know, take these people into Macedonia, they're not a threat. I remember just having to wing it.Īnd so the people who seemed like they might be having a heart attack or a seizure, those were the ones that went into that tent.īut, you know, people with physical disabilities, no.Įverybody else I had to direct to this other tent and someone ended up calling it The Tent of the Damned. Well, I don't remember having guidelines. And so my job was to stand outside that door and decide who gets in and who doesn't.Īnd like, how did you do that? How did you make that choice? Literally, I stood outside of this makeshift medical station and every minute, every couple of minutes, there would be another patient brought to the door of our medical tent. But a few hundred years ago, the word started being applied to people, to actually sorting different kinds of casualties on a battlefield. Originally it was a reference to sorting coffee beans, actually, sorting different kinds of coffee. And here's the key, eventually she gets posted at the door of the tent.Īnd what I ended up doing, or what they put me in charge of, was triage. Suddenly, she says, she was tossed in with all these war doctors. What, so you were just out of med school when this happened? They just grabbed you and pulled you into this tent? I was there to collect information but when I got there I literally remember walking up to this border, and a doctor who I had interviewed previously, this really tall Albanian, Kosovo-Albanian doctor, looked out and he told the Macedonian border guards, 'Let her in, we need her. Now, Sheri was there to conduct interviews, nothing to do with medicine. It was this sort of frumpy, brown medical tent. So you had all of these people crammed into this muddy channel.Īnd the Macedonian Red Cross and this one charity had gotten permission to set up a makeshift medical station in that border area between these two countries. She said police in riot gear were basically lining the Macedonian side. They got stuck in this muddy no man's land between the two borders. They were trying to cross the border into Macedonia but the Macedonian government had closed its border with Kosovo, so people who were fleeing got trapped. So I remember I went to the border of Kosovo and Macedonia and, like, a hundred thousand refugees had shown up. And since she knew the landscape, she was able to convince this organization to let her go to Macedonia to document what was happening, to document potential war crimes. She was fresh out of med school, volunteering at a human rights organization, working on a book about a war hospital in Bosnia. Now Sheri at the time was not yet fully a reporter. NATO was trying to protect them, bombing Serbia, which was creating a huge exodus of refugees. You had Serbia attacking ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

This is basically like the last gasps of war in the former Yugoslavia. The US and other, I think NATO, allies were involved in a bombing campaign in Serbia. So for reporter Sheri Fink, who works at the New York Times and is author of the book Five Days at Memorial, you could say it all began with two tents. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at /donate. Eric Toner of the UPMC Center for Health Security. Lee Daugherty Biddison from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Howie Gwon from the Johns Hopkins Medicine Office of Emergency Management, Alan Regenberg of the Berman Institute of Bioethics and Dr. Special thanks also to: Pat Walters and Jim McCutcheon and Todd Menesses from WWL in New Orleans, the researchers for the allocation of scarce resources project in Maryland - Dr. You can find more about the work going on in Maryland at: Very special thanks to Lilly Sullivan. In the book that inspired this episode you can find more about what transpired at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina, Sheri Fink’s exhaustively reported Five Days at Memorial Produced by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen.

What happens, what should happen, when humans are forced to play god? In a warzone, a hurricane, a church basement, and an earthquake, the question remains the same. In this episode, we follow New York Times reporter Sheri Fink as she searches for the answer. Would your answer change if a sick person was standing right in front of you? Maybe you even just put all the names in a hat and pick at random. When people are dying and you can only save some, how do you choose? Maybe you save the youngest.

Sheri fink