Bearing Witness in the ER

By Bill Shore | August 20, 2007

With media attention to gun violence in Newark, Chicago, Philadelphia and other urban communities beginning to increase, ABC News this week ran a story about a new program in the emergency room, created by a trauma surgeon, that is less about medicine than it is about bearing witness.

Read the story here.

Temple University Hospital's chief trauma surgeon, Amy Goldberg, created Cradle to the Grave to bring at risk youth into the emergency room to show them what getting shot really looks like. She and other outreach workers describe in graphic detail the wounds of young people who had died in that very room and the limitations of even the most gifted doctors in the face of indiscriminate violence. More than 600 of Philadelphia's inner city youth have come to see and learn.

Too often contemporary culture isolates the deadly consequences of decisions and behaviors and keeps them far from our field of vision, keeping death antiseptic and invisible. Whether it is the current Administration's refusal to allow photos of the returning coffins of those killed in Iraq, or the media's addiction to the celebrity driven news that boosts ratings and ad revenues, programs that enable us to bear witness first hand, like Cradle to the Grave, are a necessary counter-balance.