War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line

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This book is filled with heartwarming/heartbreaking stories of emergency surgeries that both succeed and fail and the equally heartbreaking stories of man’s inhumanity to other men. David Nott took it all a step further when he arranged to begin a teaching course to educate other medical personnel and doctors about life saving techniques and surgeries in non-medical environments in these war-torn countries. He is a hero in the 21st century. So powerful and honest. Extraordinary. -- Elizabeth Buchan, author of The New Mrs Clifton and I Can't Begin to Tell You

My final patient came in. She was very, very unhappy that she had had to wait for six weeks to see me, and very, very disappointed that I did not seem to care that she had been made to wait. She began talking about her thread veins, which again seemed utterly trivial. As she was talking all I could hear was a roaring in my ears and the tension in my body rose until I couldn’t take it any longer. I suddenly stood up and screamed as loudly as I could. She looked at me in astonishment and left. I sat on my consulting room chair for the next three hours just staring at the ceiling. We’re hardly short of books by doctors describing difficult work carried out in straitened circumstances – think Rachel Clarke’s Your Life in My Hands or Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt– but Nott’s is something else entirely. Where most people strive to avoid trouble, he actively goes in search of it. “It is a kind of addiction,” he says in the prologue, “a pull I find hard to resist.” His stories of courage and compassion in the face of seemingly certain death are breathtaking. There’s the time, for instance, that Syrian jihadis stormed the makeshift hospital in which he was working after spotting him on the roof with a camera. Assuming he was photographing their movements, they were poised to drag him away but were persuaded not to on realising that the camera contained pictures of sunsets. Or there’s the moment he and his head nurse were driven to meet Mullah Omar, the feared Taliban leader, to secure permission to operate on a young Afghan woman who was haemorrhaging after childbirth. “His manner was serene, almost statesman-like,” Nott recalls. “I think just to get rid of us, he agreed to our request.” I liked how the author spoke in detail of the operations, I was a bit lost, I don't know more than the basic anatomy and roughly which organs do what, and this was detailed and very bloody, but interesting too. I liked hearing about the patients and the little he knew of their lives and countries, especially the Syrians and Syria for which he has a great deal of affection. One intensive care ward containing four patients with all modern life=support equipment was run by a single nurse who continually noted all vital signs and urine etc outputs. Each bed had two video cameras on it, and with her data and those pictures, and Arab-American doctors in the US monitored the ward 24 hours a day and directed the treatment. I was very impressed. In my reflections following this enlightening read, I would prefer not to select a single “most interesting part” of the book, as there are too many near-death experiences—coming face-to-face with ISIS fighters, driving across some of the most dangerous roads in the world and being held at gunpoint. All these are suspenseful, heart-stopping moments. The #1 internationally bestselling, gripping true story of a frontline trauma surgeon operating in the world’s most dangerous war zones

The Realities of War

Not only do you need to deal with medical emergencies without proper equipment, you also need to process the thought that you may be saving someone’s life who will go on to commit atrocious crimes. You just don’t know who you are healing in a war zone.

I have a deep respect for anyone who goes into dangerous situations to help those in need, even if their own lives are at risk. I could never envision myself doing that! This memoir gives a very good indication of what these people go through. The author was cogent in explaining the important role of war doctors and tells us the significance of acquiring the necessary expertise before going into the battlefields as a war doctor. Ability to work with minimal resources is the most essential quality that a war doctor should possess. He also tells us the importance of having a strong mind as the patients we have to deal with due to the war injuries are entirely different from those we regularly treat in hospitals and clinics. Nott remains an important witness to the haunting human price of that modern triad: geopolitical instability, poor governance and ever more powerful weaponry * Nature * I'm currently a third of the way through We Can't Say We Didn't Know and it does everything David Nott doesn't do. There's a combination of facts and news to understand the politics of conflict; alongside a focus on the humans who stayed behind or left and why.David Nott operated on countless victims, soldiers, children and doctors alike in the past 30+ years of his voluntary work as a doctor on the front lines. The descriptions he has written for his experiences will stay with me for the rest of my life, I can only imagine how it will stay with him.

Nott’s first consultancy post was at Charing Cross Hospital in London. Surgeon friends there told him about Médecins Sans Frontières, an organisation offering short placements abroad for medical personnel. With agreement from his employer, Nott was able to take unpaid leave from the NHS and go on his first mission – to Sarajevo in 1993.As the quran says in surat 5:32 whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved the life of whole mankind.” As a surgeon myself, I can only look on what he has achieved with complete awe, overwhelmed by his heroism and compassion as much as by the world's cruelty -- Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm * New Statesman * I'm not here to pass judgement on Nott, although, I must say, he really doesn't come across as likeable or three dimensional in terms of "character" depth. Quotation marks because he is a real person. I'm just very confused that this is how he's chosen to portray himself given that he was both controlling this entire narrative and the only character in the book. It was considered one of the longest sieges of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. During the Bosnian war, Sarajevo was besieged by the Army of Republika Srpska. The author is mentioning in detail all the difficulties that the people of Sarajevo had to go through.