In his book Monrovia, Mon Amour, Dalrymple writes of, and analyzes almost as an archaeologist, a hospital completely vandalized during the Liberian Civil War. In a piece at Pajamas Media, he notes that the hospital has now been reopened but is ground zero for the Ebola epidemic. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine laments the deaths from Ebola of two doctors there but veers into what Dalrymple calls humbug:
The article suggests that, horrible as their deaths were, those of the two doctors in Monrovia were good in the sense that the ancients meant: deaths, in other words, consciously faced and to some higher purpose. One can indeed admire their bravery, their devotion to duty. But I think it hyperbole to say, as do the authors, that “Dr Sam Brisbane’s death diminishes us a people.”