In recent months, I’ve taken a growing interest in reading the accounts of health care workers from conflict zones, areas of the world caught in a crossfire of warring factions, where men, women, and children bear the collateral damage wrought by bombs and bullets. Health care workers’ harrowing stories are some of the most unvarnished ones we have to hear, and as a physician myself, I take them in with equal measures of inspiration and disbelief. Hearing about the types of duress they have been under, I have often wondered how I could help.

At first, I thought I could not. Beyond sharing an understanding of our bodies’ inner workings and an instinct to be compassionate towards those who are ill, I find unimaginable what many of my colleagues are thrust into doing. For example, in Gaza they are salvaging or amputating blast-riddled limbs, performing surgeries to staunch catastrophic bleeds with no prior surgical training, maintaining resolve in the face of the indiscriminate suffering of innocent lives which might otherwise be helped with the most basic of medicines, and stemming the resurgence of a debilitating virus that has long been presumed to be eradicated. The sliver in the Venn diagram of where our practices of medicine overlap is inconceivably slim. Yet I have found that they do nonetheless — the embers stoked by these confrontations reach even me, half a world away.

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I work in a clinic in Toronto that largely serves patients who are newcomers to our country, many of whom are seeking asylum. The relationship between patients and doctors is frequently one born of unfortunate and unpredictable events. Patients arrive to our clinic from disparate places such as Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, and Pakistan. What funnels........

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