Does humanitarian medicine truly exist, or is it merely medicine practiced in a humanitarian setting or with a humanitarian history? The question of whether humanitarian medicine exists, as a sub-discipline of emergency medicine, has been answered institutionally in the United Kingdom by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh after many years of lobbying. The RCSEd now offers a professional development course titled ‘Introduction to Humanitarian Healthcare,’ recognizing it as a formal field of study. This course emerged from a well-established tradition of training NHS practitioners for work in ‘austere’ environments.

From a medical practice viewpoint this definition of humanitarian medicine as medicine in austere environments made sense and responded to an institutional necessity to account for experience and training in a rigid educational and training pathway. Yet this story is only a small part of the history of humanitarian medicine. If it is indeed a medicine with a humanitarian history, the nature of that history remains to be fully explored and one ought to question the role of historians and historical accounts in shaping this medicine. There is no such thing as a fly on the wall when much of this history appears to be recent, dating arguably from the late 1970s, shaped by groups of individuals in search of a common set of practices – an epistemic community.

Our Developing Humanitarian Medicine project investigates how this community formed around interactions between United Nations agencies, large and increasingly autonomous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and national health ministries, such as the Somalian Ministry of Health in the 1980s. Our research is part of a broader notion that the tools, objects, medical kits and logistical concerns of this recent history are essential components of complex exchanges around standards, medical practices, innovation and drug access.  These exchanges engaged humanitarians, states in the North and South, pharmaceutical industries and delineated ways of doing and ways of knowing which, taken together, can be described as the history of humanitarian medicine.

For our project, archive making through oral history and new operational archives recording the minutiae of interactions is key to our approach because we recognize that humanitarian medicine is increasingly shaped by its history.