01
The Face of the Other in Gaza
Common Dreams
I found faces, hundreds of them, of children, mothers, teachers, tired men with empty pockets and broken sandals. Each looked directly into my eyes and asked: Are you still human?
Newsletter
Essays and dispatches delivered when there is something worth saying.
Dr. Mark Brauner
Emergency Physician. Writer. Bioethicist. Humanitarian.
Forty years in emergency rooms have taught me that medicine, at its best, is an act of moral witness. I write and speak about what it means to show up fully for human beings at their most vulnerable.
Forthcoming Book
On Hard
Doctoring
On Hard Doctoring is a reckoning with forty years of emergency medicine: the weight of decisions made in seconds, the moral injuries that accumulate in silence, and the radical act of remaining present when everything in you wants to look away. It is a book for physicians, nurses, patients, and anyone who has ever stood at the threshold of suffering and wondered what it means to truly help.
Be Notified at Publication"The emergency room is not a place where medicine happens to people. It is a place where medicine happens between people, and that difference is everything."
From On Hard Doctoring
About
Dr. Mark Brauner, DO, FACEP, is an emergency physician, writer, bioethicist, and humanitarian physician whose work lives at the intersection of medicine, conscience, and human presence. For more than forty years, as an EMT, paramedic, flight physician, medical director, and bioethics chair, he has stood at the bedside of people in crisis. In 2025, he served at Nasser Hospital in Gaza. His forthcoming book, On Hard Doctoring, is a reckoning with what medicine demands of us, and what we owe to the people who need it most.
Read the Full BiographyThemes
What He Writes and Speaks About
- 01Presence & Attention in MedicineThe discipline of truly seeing the patient in front of you.
- 02Medical Ethics & Moral InjuryWhat medicine asks of us, and what it costs when we comply.
- 03AI and the Future of DoctoringWhat algorithms cannot replace, and what they will change forever.
- 04Humanitarian Medicine & GazaBearing witness at the intersection of medicine and catastrophe.
- 05Nursing and the Invisible Labor of CareThe people who hold the system together while it ignores them.
- 06Physician Identity & BurnoutWho we become after decades of absorbing what patients carry.
- 07The Sacred Weight of Human VulnerabilityWhy the most important thing a physician can do is remain human.
Podcast
Under The Olive Trees
Long-format discussions with nurses about life and nursing.
A long-form conversation series with nurses about the realities of life in nursing: the weight they carry, the patients they remember, the system that asks too much, and the reasons they stay. These are the voices that hold medicine together.
Coming Soon
Coming Soon
Writing
Recent Writing
02
Worse Than Fiction: Responding to a Mass Casualty Event in Gaza
Common Dreams
A firsthand account of mass casualties at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, and what it reveals about medicine, atrocity, and the limits of bearing witness.
03
The Milk That Never Came
Palestine Chronicle
In Gaza, famine is measured not only in calories and corpses but in something far more intimate: the severing of the bond between mother and child.
Speaking
Speaking
Dr. Brauner brings forty years of emergency medicine, bioethics, and humanitarian work into every room he enters. He speaks not from theory but from the accumulated weight of what he has seen, and from a conviction that medicine can be practiced with more courage, more presence, and more moral clarity than it currently is.
Inquire About Speaking