Description
Twenty-four stories spread across four countries in two continents and over thirty-five years hold as their common theme the uniqueness of each encounter between doctor and patient and the need for doctors to be endlessly creative in finding solutions – whether medical, social, psychological or emotional – that will meet the needs of the individual whole person. Working in the remote rural communities of his native Nepal under a totalitarian and far from benign regime, the author learns early that he must be aware of not only medical problems but the social, political and cultural context of each and every case. Often as much a detective or a father-confessor as a health practitioner, he discovers that helping individuals to face the truth while saving face can be at least as important as the use of more conventional medical techniques. This knowledge and the all-important skill of listening to what is said, and what is not said, prove invaluable in the move to the UK where he encounters deprivation of a quite different sort the deprivation of lonely old age.
