Such euphemisms as ‘presents’, ‘brown envelopes’, ‘collateral things’, even ‘bribes’ do not describe the reality. This system of bribes is best described as medical terrorism. Bribes are what doctors receive. Terror is what the population experiences.

When 19-year-old Romanian Eva Szabo discovered she had cancer, she didn't understand why her family were so upset. Two years on, she faces the future in a country where home support and palliative care are only beginning.

When she was 14, Karin Peters' uncle died of cancer. 'It felt like a bomb had been dropped on top of my world,' she says.

David Swann is a medical doctor who has become known in Canada for sticking his neck out on points of principle. He talked to Gordon Legge at a moment when the debate about war with Iraq was at its height.

When Omnia Marzouk, a consultant paediatrician in Liverpool, visited India, she discovered another side to her history.

The writer has asked to remain anonymous.

Raj Anand knows the formula to save 1.5 million babies' lives a year - and it doesn't come out of a tin. He talks to Mike Brown.

When Czechoslovak student protester Jan Palach set himself alight in 1969, Jara Moserova-Davidova was one of the specialists who treated him. Now head of UNESCO in the Czech Republic she has lived under Nazi and communist oppression-and seen both systems collapse. She talks to Mary Lean.

Sheila Cassidy shot to fame when she was arrested and tortured for treating a guerrilla fighter in Pinochet's Chile. Now a specialist in the care of the terminally ill, she talks to Kenneth Noble.

David Allbrook's watchword has led him into famine relief, the hospice movement, the presidency of Amnesty International in Australia and pioneering medical training in East Africa. John Bond meets an academic who believes in action.