Itinerant Doctors

From the International Brigades and the Chinese Revolution to the Cold War

The Spanish Civil War and the Chinese war against Japan both transcended their borders. For a large part of world public opinion, they were the advance guard of the great contemporary ideological and military conflicts. Some international volunteers decided to get directly involved and share on the ground the fate of those countries until then on the sidelines of the global chessboard. Among them, few were as important as the international team of doctors who, first integrated in the International Brigades in favor of the Spanish Republic and later as collaborators of the Chinese Red Cross, were remarkable for the continuity of their ideological commitment and their personal sacrifice, for the importance of their medical knowledge, for their individual and collective significance, and for the indelible imprint on their lives of those experiences.

The researcher Carles Brasó Broggi recovers with unpublished documentation from archives around the world, the history of these itinerant doctors, both during their time in the two wars, as well as their previous and subsequent careers, closely linked to internationalist movements, the communist influence, the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War.