ABSTRACT

This chapter describes humanitarian parallels and alternatives to human rights discourse, focusing on the outspoken organization Doctors without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). It presents MSF's turn to advocacy for medical access and direct involvement with problems of pharmaceutical production and distribution with reference to the particular landscape of Uganda. At the beginning of the 1970s, two small groups of French doctors and a few journalists working for a medical review came together to establish a new humanitarian organization. In addition directly caring for suffering people, Medecins Sans Frontieres group soon came to reserve the right to speak out on their behalf, practicing a form of advocacy under the name of temoignage. From a marginal and oppositional French group, the "doctors without borders" clearly had grown into an established transnational presence, no longer simply French or simply centered around physicians. The Ugandan projects devoted to sleeping sickness and AIDS mark different points on MSF's trajectory into pharmaceutical activism.