Signs of Life
To the Ends of the Earth with a Doctor
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4.0 • 7 Ratings
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
'A thoughtful exploration of humanity ... Fabes is great company and makes riding bicycles seem like the best way to see and understand the world' - Guardian
They say that being a good doctor boils down to just four things: Shut up, listen, know something, care.
The same could be said for life on the road, too.
When Stephen Fabes left his job as a junior doctor and set out to cycle around the world, frontline medicine quickly faded from his mind. Of more pressing concern were the daily challenges of life as an unfit rider on an overloaded bike, helplessly in thrall to pastries. But leaving medicine behind is not as easy as it seems.
As he roves continents, he finds people whose health has suffered through exile, stigma or circumstance, and others, whose lives have been saved through kindness and community. After encountering a frozen body of a monk in the Himalayas, he is drawn ever more to healthcare at the margins of the world, to crumbling sanitoriums and refugee camps, to city dumps and war-torn hospital wards. And as he learns the value of listening to lives - not just solving diagnostic puzzles - Stephen challenges us to see care for the sick as a duty born of our humanity, and our compassion.
Customer Reviews
Whether you are a cyclist, a doctor or neither of the above, this is a book worthy of your time
Signs of Life is no ordinary cycling travelogue. In fact, to refer to it as a ‘cycling travelogue’ is probably doing it a significant disservice as the book is much, much more than that. The bicycle itself plays a secondary role in this six-year odyssey around the planet. If you are looking for tails of mechanical tribulations, inconveniently timed punctures or day-by-day breakdowns of kilometres cycled and towns visited, you might want to look elsewhere. Dr. Fabes’ approach is much more selective. How could it be anything otherwise when in one volume of writing such a long period needs to be addressed? That said, he manages to be selective without making the reader think they have been short changed. Many of the 75 countries are mentioned only in passing or not at all. Even one or two of the continents do not take up as much space as you might imagine, especially in the early years as he makes his way through Europe and Africa. This might have been a very long, very slow journey for author; it is anything but for the reader.
Yet what he does manage to do with great success is discuss his time on the minor roads of the world – he purposely avoids the bigger ones – in an immensely engaging manner; the friends who join him for long stretches of his journey, the travellers he meets along the way, the locals he spends time with. Some of those encounters do not end well but the stories are retold in a reflective manner that involves just as much questioning of his own actions as those of others. He also takes the opportunity to delve into the history of cycle travel, comparing his own epic journey with those of the pioneers of long-distance cycling. Such interludes sit perfectly comfortably with his modern-day stories of people met and places visited. And then, as he approaches Asia, as Dr. Fabes begins to spend more time within the medical world from which he comes, the book discusses his experiences of meeting the practitioners working in the clinics and hospitals he visits. Diseases are discussed, outcomes for patients mused upon and historical perspectives analysed but never to the extent that might daunt a non-medic such as me and, probably, you.
Readjusting to the normality of life after his self-imposed isolation is not neglected by Stephen Fabes as he returns home to the acclaim of family, friends and colleagues. The cycling doctor recounts his tales of readjustment with, once again, humility and humour.
Whether you are a cyclist, a doctor or neither of the above, this is a book worthy of your time, although probably not quite six years…