Hiroshima and ourselves
Lifton, R.J.
JAMA 254(5): 631-632
1985
ISSN/ISBN: 0098-7484 PMID: 3892069 Document Number: 244209
The physician author of Death in Life (Basic Books; 1982) relates his experiences interviewing survivors of the American nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II. Lifton describes his initial distress upon hearing his informants' descriptions of what they had lived through, and how it became necessary for him to establish a psychic distance between himself and his subjects in order to work. He writes of the survivors' immediate reactions to the death and destruction around them, and recounts their lifelong concern with death as they watch for signs of radiation sickness in themselves and signs of abnormalities in their children. The account ends with the thoughts of one survivor who stresses that the atomic bomb "has the power to make everything into nothing."