War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line

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He says that even in the hospital the female nurses had to wear burkhas and cover their eyes with crocheted veils. One of them flashed her ankle showing fishnet tights - that counts as an act of defiance there. Men, fathers or husbands and children were not allowed to visit the female wards. If the woman was dying, she died without seeing them, she died alone. One of the most brutally vivid evocations of modern warfare that you will read . . . superb, unforgettable, simply written and painfully clear . . . You are constantly amazed that men such as Nott can witness the extraordinary cruelties of the human race, so many and so foul, yet keep going. Be warned: this is a powerful but often traumatic read., Sunday Times 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 * Book Genre: Autobiography, Biography, Biography Memoir, Health, Medical, Medicine, Memoir, Nonfiction, Science, War

Very rarely do I read a book and say, uncaring of a person's taste or of their choice in literature, that this is a necessary read. I’d need a fantastic breadth of knowledge in general surgery, which I was on the way to achieving. And I realized it would also be good to know a lot about vascular surgery, too: if I was to spend time in dangerous places, I’d be seeing and dealing with a lot of injuries from bullets or bombs, and knowing how to clamp off blood vessels would be essential.”

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So powerful and honest. Extraordinary. -- Elizabeth Buchan, author of The New Mrs Clifton and I Can't Begin to Tell You Over time, the physical and mental exertion can take a toll on the doctors themselves. It is not easy to grapple with the incessant presence of death, especially the horrifying and disfiguring injuries inflicted upon children. It is equally challenging to navigate the return to normality as the imbalance between the two worlds is often too harsh. Consequently, partaking in such missions requires a high level of self-awareness and knowing when to seek help to recover from the after-effects.

When he started to pray, I could understand that, he was under the most enormous pressure. But he put himself there! He admits that the first time he was under threat of losing his life and lived, he got the most amazing rush and had become addicted to it, physically, like a junkie. But then he meets his future wife, although he is in older middle age by now and never married, and she goes to church every lunchtime to pray for him and he gets religion and I start to skim. 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.” A mother prepares to send her child out of Sarajevo on a bus promised safe passage by the Serb forces during the siege in 1992. Photograph: Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty Images Description: 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. 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.

I felt a touch of annoyance over Nott's arrogance as he often reiterated his frustrations working with medical personnel who disagreed with him (and, of course, he was always right!); however, I don't recall him sharing any stories when his methods were wrong; and, One of the most brutally vivid evocations of modern warfare that you will read . . . superb, unforgettable, simply written and painfully clear . . . You are constantly amazed that men such as Nott can witness the extraordinary cruelties of the human race, so many and so foul, yet keep going. Be warned: this is a powerful but often traumatic read. * Sunday Times *