Until recently, the emergency room at Liberia’s main hospital was “a place you came to die,” says Dr. Braden Hexom, who teaches emergency medicine at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine. With perhaps the world’s highest rate of newborn mortality, Liberia had not a single pediatrician. The hospital had no means of administering treatment intravenously. There was no imaging equipment – not even a simple x-ray machine.
