The ethics of migration and critical illness

Excerpt

The image of a drowned child in the sands of Bodrum excites our compassion in a manner that statistics cannot. This is no longer a distant refugee crisis, it is Aylan Kurdi: in a different world he might have been playing with our own children on that beach. As physicians we try to make sense of death from disease, to find causal pathways which help us interpret tragic outcomes, live with loss, and prevent others from following the same route. The death of Aylan Kurdi and many more refugees, both children and adults, demands a political version of the causal pathway which understands how desperation and desire drive people to risk their lives in search of sanctuary or affluence, as might we if our positions were reversed. The history of mankind is the history of migration. …