Barsky in a hospital tent. Spain, ca. 1937. Barsky Photo Collection, Tamiment, NYU. Colorized.

The Volunteer is thrilled to honor Dr. Barsky on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

When Dr. Edward K. Barsky passed away, in February 1975, his New York Times obituary described him as the doctor “who left his post as a surgeon in New York to join the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War”; who “helped Spanish republican refugees” after the war; and who “was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1947 for refusing, with other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, to turn over the group’s records” to the House Un-American Activities Committee. As a result of this conviction, Barsky lost his license to practice medicine.

In this special Volunteer tribute to Dr. Barsky, you will find stories by Phillip Deery and Sebastiaan Faber about all these aspects of Barsky’s work on behalf of Spanish democracy. We are also proud to include a handful of texts by the surgeon himself, who, despite being naturally shy and self-effacing, was an inspiring public speaker. Moreover, this coming February 11, ALBA will pay tribute to Dr. Barsky with an online event to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

“When you go before the Un-American Activities Committee, you’re not just a man—or a woman—picked out of the air,” he told Richard Avedon and Doon Arbus six years earlier, as he sat for a portrait that would appear in the book The Sixties:

You’re somebody who has something to do with something. And that something should be a matter of principle to you. The Un-American Activities Committee had no principles. They were just a bunch of bastards, you see. They were un-American. So when I was up there and they asked me questions, I wouldn’t answer them. If I hadn’t gone to Spain, I wouldn’t be here talking to you, you know? And I wouldn’t have gone to jail, and I wouldn’t have lived that kind of a life. And I’m proud and happy that I did live that kind of life. … We knew we were right. It was a very simple thing as far as we were concerned. It was the simplest thing. You didn’t have to be a magician—or a god—to know that.

Barsky delivering a radio address, Spain. Barsky Photo Collection, Tamiment, NYU. Colorized.

This clarity of vision accompanied Barsky throughout his life and work. As head of the American medical unit in Spain, he was indefatigable. “Every operation that Dr. Edward Barsky performed was really a work of art,” Mildred Rackley recalled in the pamphlet From a Hospital in Spain. “One night at 2 o’clock, in the middle of an operation, the battery went dead. All of us ran for our flashlights, and with the feeble glimmer of eight flashlights, Dr. Barsky finished removing a shattered kidney.”

Always generous and self-effacing, Barsky shunned the limelight and often credited the Spanish people with modeling for him what courage ought to look like. “I remember in Barcelona when they used to bomb us every two hours—on the clock. … And I would see young girls standing in the street, old women, old men, shaking their fists and cursing at the planes. But they had that courage.”

He credits the wounded patients that he treated under the most horrific conditions with giving him strength: “It is inspiring to witness the wonderful spirit that all the wounded have—they try to assist each other and cooperate with everyone. It is only because they—each and every one of them—know that they are fighting and why they are fighting that they are able to carry on as they do. … They know what it is all about.”

Barsky’s interview and portrait in “The Sixties,” by Avedon and Arbus.

He was, moreover, always sure to credit his team of healthcare professionals—the nurses in particular—for the “wonderful work” they did in the most difficult of circumstances, singling out their clarity, endurance, and bravery: “These girls have worked under all sorts of strain with a willingness and courage that, between you and me, is a source of inspiration to the doctors.”

Dr. Barsky, always the team player, might have balked at the idea of being singled out for praise in a tribute like this special issue of The Volunteer. He would have been the first to remind us, like so many volunteers have done throughout the years, that in fighting for the cause of Spain, he received more than he gave.

The Barsky Award

The 2024 Barsky Award.

The Edward Barsky Award, established in 1984, is an international prize granted annually at the Health Activist Dinner, which is celebrated during the meetings of the American Public Health Association. The dinner is meant for public health and healthcare workers and students who want to meet, share information, and provide mutual support with the goal of promoting social justice.

The Health Activist Dinner dinner traces its roots to the Physicians Forum, established in 1941 by the Progressive Group of the New York County Medical Society, which had been founded two years earlier. The Forum, in which Barsky played a leading role, was the first physicians’ organization to propose a national comprehensive healthcare system for the United States that would be government-sponsored and government-guaranteed. It was involved in the fight for full rights for African-American physicians and other minority health workers. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it advocated for an end to the discrimination practiced by the American Medical Association and other healthcare institutions. Its leaders were instrumental in establishing the Medical Committee for Human Rights and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

In the international arena, the Physicians Forum opposed the Vietnam War and U.S. government support of right-wing insurgencies in Central America. Its members played leadership roles in many healthcare-support activities for health workers in Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, and other countries. In the 1970s and 1980s, its members were involved in drafting much of Senator Edward Kennedy’s health care legislation and the National Health Service Act of Congressman Ron Dellums. Its members helped to establish Physicians for a National Health Program.

In 1984, the Physicians Forum developed a national award (The Paul Cornely Award) and an international award (The Edward Barsky Award) presented to individuals embodying the Forum’s ideals. In 2002, it established the Paul Wellstone Award for a legislator who embodied Senator Wellstone’s ideals and arranged for the American Medical Student Association to present its annual Outstanding Student Activist Award. During the 1990s, The Physicians Forum evolved into what is now the Health Activist Dinner.

More information at HealthActivistDinner.org.