India M. Clamp's Reviews > War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line

** spoiler alert ** Imagine, operating while shrapnel flies, in the open and sometimes when you look up from the surgical table you find your nurse and anesthetist have abandoned their post. This is the “schwarz welt” where Dr. David Nott exists for a time to bring mercy, healing and safeguarding for up to ten lives a day in Syria. Is “sapienta superat morus” his mantra?

War and Dr. Nott---sans personal life---describes its’ sanguine tragedy of a baby being rescued from a building with a crushed arm and part of its little skull lost. So foreign to the little OC Babies here in California---who would never come know a tragedy of such magnitude. Chaos was the cocktail Dr. Nott drank nightly and retitled it normal.

“In the chaotic first few days after the disaster...I had resolved to share the dreadful story of the pregnant woman whose unborn baby had been shot...and talk about how truly wicked things were in northern Syria.”
---David Nott, General & Vascular Surgeon (U.K.)

In this world, hospitals are targets (like physicians and all medical personnel). We follow him in his travels to Afghanistan, Libya, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Iraq, Haiti, Syria and Gaza hearing the sniper fire, bombs and ghoulish like screams. After work most physicians retire to the sanctity of a trouble-free domicile, Nott seeks just the opposite.

“War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Lines” is not for the meek. Certain death was surely on the menu when meeting the Taliban leader for approval on an operation for an Afghan lady. Despite such circumstances, Nott was serene, composed and the paradigm of a Welsh, University of Manchester (UK) trained vascular surgeon. Read.