Caught this rather compelling interview with Dr Nott, a trauma surgeon who goes to warzones during his holiday periods to provide life-saving surgery.
Eddie Mair's warning about a small section with graphic injury description should be heeded by the squeamish.
Intro re Syria and subsequent interview starts around 18.00
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04vdzyk
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>> trauma surgeon who goes to warzones during his holiday periods to provide life-saving surgery.
I used to drink with a couple of those in Chad, Médecins du Monde. They were rich and civilized cats, Frenchmen with hobbies... one was a keen rifle shot. Like MSF they were supposedly inspired by Albert Schweitzer, who believed strongly in 'local immunities' to protect his patients from infection. They showed me one of their operating theatres and sure enough, the operating pad was covered in dried blood and there was cigarette ash on the floor.
From the patients' (militia, soldiers and innocent bystanders who had been shot or blown up during that country's confused skein of conflicts) point of view though, 'local immunities' or not, treatment by top French orthopaedic surgeons must have been a lot better for their chances than the nothing they would have got otherwise.
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A good friend, a local doctor, has just retired from our county accident rescue service of which he was a founder member. He is something of a local hero, and I know him chiefly because he used to come out with our band to do his Elvis impersonation and occasionally, he would be late for a gig having just attended some awful accident on the A14. One minute attending to death and injury, and the next, crooning The Wonder of You.
I called round at his place one evening with my guitar to rehearse a few numbers with him, and found him going through a, to say the least, gory powerpoint presentation on his laptop. He'd had the bright idea of getting some of the medics from a nearby US base interested in his work at road crash sites; he thought all this might be good practice for them.
I saw him a couple of weeks later and asked how he'd got on; the answer was 'not very well'. Apparently most of the questions revolved around "But how much d'ya get paid for this?" Answer - "Nothing" ………. and worries about being sued if you'd sawn off someone's arm to get them out of a burning car.
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R4 PM - Dr David Nott - Armel Coussine
