“The gun debate would change in an instant if Americans witnessed the horrors that trauma surgeons confront everyday.”

Cancer surgery for $700, a heart bypass for $2,000. Pretty good, but under India’s new health-care system, it’s not good enough.

Each year, about 50,000 women are severely injured giving birth. Half of these injuries could be reduced or eliminated with better care.

The U.S. has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world. The story of a neonatal nurse helps illustrate why.

A tour of a nonprofit that collects, warehouses, and donates perfectly good stuff hospitals throw away, from anesthesia machines to unopened surgical tools.

Did Afghan forces target the M.S.F. hospital?

The misadventures of two hospital workers, from the 1992 collection Jesus' Son.

"The eye man was on vacation or something. While the hospital’s operator called around to find someone else just as good, the other specialists were hurrying through the night to join us. I stood around looking at charts and chewing up more of Georgie’s pills. Some of them tasted the way urine smells, some of them burned, some of them tasted like chalk. Various nurses, and two physicians who’d been tending somebody in I.C.U., were hanging out down here with us now."

How a Texas woman pushed for autopsy reform.

Clinical autopsies, once commonplace in American hospitals, have become an increasing rarity and are conducted in just 5 percent of hospital deaths. Grief-stricken families like the Carswells desperately want the answers that an autopsy can provide. But they often do not know their rights in dealing with either coroners or medical examiners, who investigate unnatural deaths, or health-care providers, who delve into natural ones.