Surgery and Healing in the Developing World - Dartmouth-Hitchcock

Preface
Surgery and Healing in the Developing
World
There is a lot of very diverse world out there that needs healing, surgical
and otherwise. As medicine in general and surgery in particular are getting
more standardized in principle and practice led by technologic advances in
the hyperdeveloped and over-serviced advanced First World nations, there
are increasingly numerous and more impoverished peoples in the majority
part of the world’s “south” euphemistically referred to in the hopeful economic
term “developing” who suffer lack of almost everything which is found
in such redundancy in the neighboring “north.”
What and Where Is “The Developing World”?
There may be many ways of drawing arbitrary distinctions among the
dominant species on earth, what color the skin, what language is spoken,
what religion practiced, what ethnic, political or geographic origins are
claimed; but an increasingly obvious and widening gap is a simpler one: the
“haves” and the “have nots.” The tyranny of the dismal science that draws
this simple economic distinction is what makes it so frustrating to have such
citizens in such close proximity with such disparate advantages.
This is not the difference between economic systems—capitalism or communism,
as examples—nor political systems—democracy versus oligarchy,
as examples—nor means of livelihood, however they may have evolved historically—foragers,
agrarian, industrialists or service providers, as examples.
The tragically simple ratio of numerator to denominator applies to individuals,
family units, classes and nation states: if the resources expand more
than the population rise that they support, this means such a micropopulation
enjoys a rise in its standard of living: by the definition to be used here, “The
First World,” with North America and the EEC coming immediately to
mind as the development goal most emulated.
If both the wealth of the community and the population increase it supports
rise commensurably, it may be defined as “The Second World” in terms
of development, examples being much of South America and some of Asia.
In this group of developing “wannabes” the standard of living remains somewhat
static, even if the markers of the development may change from one
generation to the next, as access to an automobile may serve as an example.
In this group we might often see aberrations with markers from each environment
on either flank of the development scale in what could be called