David Nott | geographical imaginations

I’m still converting my ‘Trauma Geographies‘ lecture into an essay – which has involved writing a prequel of sorts, ‘Woundscapes of the Western Front‘ – so, with my head buzzing with first-person accounts of trauma surgery on the front-lines, I was thrilled to see that David Nott has just published an account of his marvellous work in Syria (and many other conflict zones), War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line (Pan Macmillan):

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.

There’s a good review in The Guardian here,

If you’re unfamiliar with David’s extraordinary efforts in Syria, I touch on them – all too briefly – in ‘Death of the Clinic’ here. And the David Nott Foundation Facebook page is here.

As I continue my work on the targeting of hospitals and ambulances, doctors and nurses, and on the precarious provision of medical care in Syria, I’ve been watching Skye Fitzgerald‘s remarkable documentary 50 Feet from Syria, which is now available on iTunes and (in some places) on Netflix:

With a suitcase full of donated stainless-steel bone implants, Syrian-American surgeon Hisham Bismar arrives at a Turkish hospital on the Syrian border, ready for anything. What he finds is horror, chaos, and an ocean of refugees in need of medical care: colleagues who perform operations without anesthesia, stories of Syrian government snipers targeting pregnant women and children, and images of 55 gallon barrels filled with shrapnel and TNT deliberately dropped on civilians.

With dull drill bits and ill-fitting bone and joint implants Bismar repairs the bodies of the wounded fortunate enough to find their way to the hospital – both civilians and fighters. Amongst this remarkable work, remarkable people abound: “M”, a ‘Turkish Schindler’ selflessly crossing the border each day to retrieve the wounded and ferry them to the care of surgeons, and “AM” a hero among his peers for his willingness to live for years in Syrian field hospitals repeatedly bombed by the Assad regime.

50 Feet From Syria is a portrait of a quiet and determined man, performing intricate acts of medical necessity undeterred by the chaos and complexity of war around him. The film serves as a snapshot in time for the current plight of Syrian refugees. It also indelibly communicates the human cost of one of the most brutal, dehumanizing conflicts in modern history that continues to destroy and displace millions of lives.

It’s a stark reminder of the circumstances in which, once you turn from killing to caring, 5,000 feet isn’t the best….

Someone who has demonstrated the variability of distance in these situations is the remarkable British surgeon David Nott, who has both worked in field hospitals inside Syria and also advised colleagues in Aleppo and elsewhere from London by Skype and whatsapp (the most intimate of remote medicines):

You can read much more on his work – and on the medical underground in Syria more generally – in Ben Taub‘s compelling account of ‘The shadow doctors’ at the New Yorker here.

I’ve drawn on these and many other accounts for my ‘Surgical strikes and modern war’: much more to come very soon.