The violence and atrocities of war are well documented by a range of scholars and practitioners. Likewise, counting, cataloging, and narrating the human costs of such violence has preoccupied academics from various disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives.¹ The essays in this special issue are no exception. They adopt a historiographical frame to analyse the particularities of violence against a specific set of civilians: those providing health and medical care in war. Together, they offer an insightful examination of the codification, interpretation, and origins of the legal frameworks governing attacks against medical staff and health care (AoH, Attacks on Healthcare, as used in the introduction) in armed conflict, of the lived realities of violence, and of the contrast between the rules and the reality of war, including the justifications presented for this type of violence. They expand our analytical tools for examining AoH, using lenses of intersectionality and gender, emotion and intimacy. In doing so, they provide a rich investigation of the origins of current conceptualizations, complicate our notions of “attacks” and medical neutrality, and illustrate the value of interdisciplinary approaches—and particularly that of historiography—to enrich our collective understanding.