liquidnight:

A Japanese woman awaits treatment, her back scarred by the patten of the dress she was wearing when the world’s first atomic bomb used in warfare fell on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Since white colors repelled the bomb’s heat and dark colors absorbed it, fabric designs were burned into the skin.

Estimates vary as to how many people perished in the blast itself, but most hover around eighty thousand. Many died because there was no one to care for them: nearly a third of Hiroshima’s doctors were killed outright by the blast and many of the others were wounded; 90 percent of the city’s nurses were either killed or incapacitated by the bomb; and the hospital buildings not completely leveled were seriously damaged. Over the next year, as doctors streamed into Hiroshima from around the world to help treat the wounded, another sixty thousand people died from the aftereffects of the bomb.

Photograph by Kimura Kenichi, Hiroshima, Japan, 1945

From The Face of Mercy - A Photographic History of Medicine at War