War Doctor
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4.6 • 155 Ratings
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
The Sunday Times No.1 Bestseller
‘Brave, compassionate and inspiring – it left me in floods of tears’ Adam Kay, author of This Is Going to Hurt
For more than twenty-five years, David Nott has taken unpaid leave from his job as a general and vascular surgeon with the NHS to volunteer in some of the world’s most dangerous war zones. From Sarajevo under siege in 1993, to clandestine hospitals in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, he has carried out life-saving operations and field surgery in the most challenging conditions, and with none of the resources of a major London teaching hospital.
The conflicts he has worked in form a chronology of twenty-first-century combat: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Darfur, Congo, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Gaza and Syria. But he has also volunteered in areas blighted by natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal.
Driven both by compassion and passion, the desire to help others and the thrill of extreme personal danger, he is now widely acknowledged to be the most experienced trauma surgeon in the world. But as time went on, David Nott began to realize that flying into a catastrophe – whether war or natural disaster – was not enough. Doctors on the ground needed to learn how to treat the appalling injuries that war inflicts upon its victims. Since 2015, the foundation he set up with his wife, Elly, has disseminated the knowledge he has gained, training other doctors in the art of saving lives threatened by bombs and bullets.
War Doctor is his extraordinary story.
Customer Reviews
Outstanding
Feels better to know we have people like David in the world. Utterly compelling, harrowing and heartbreaking. Thanks David.
An almost impossible listen
And I confess by the time reached Syria, I had to skip.
On the one hand there are the detailed technical descriptions of operations, very useful for his trainees and other surgeons, perhaps but for the layman….Perhaps not. On the other, there is the relentless pain, the human brutality and the too human suffering of innocent civilians. David may save a life, but we readers can do little or nothing. Finally, this is probably an easier book to read - is you so choose - than to listen to; reading allows your own imagination free rein, listening is determined by the voice, and its pace. This one lacks tonality, word follows word with an exclusivity that is almost smug. Not a book that I can really recommend as the people who should read it, won’t .
Utterly fascinating
Even if you aren’t interested in medicine I would recommend this book. A brilliant read and great that it’s narrated by David himself.