Not just because there was no one else there who was going to do that for me, but because I wouldn’t be helping anyone if I was dead.” “First, I’d have to toughen up second, I also had to take care of myself. “This experience taught me two things,” he explains. In War Doctor, Nott’s account of 25 years dispensing life-saving treatment in some of the most dangerous places in the world, he describes his fury at having been abandoned, though later he comes to understand his colleagues’ actions.

The rest of the team – an anaesthetist, a scrub nurse and an assistant – had fled the room and taken cover in the basement. When the lights eventually flickered back on, Nott realised he was all alone. The hospital had taken a direct hit, leaving him in the dark trying to stem the bleeding by squeezing the boy’s aorta while pressing down on a swab. After making the incision, he heard an enormous crash and the lights went out. He was anaesthetised and taken to an operating theatre where Nott set about opening his abdomen to inspect the damage.

Two weeks into the trip, a teenage boy was brought in with a metal fragment in his abdomen, sustained from one of the mortars that had been raining down on the city for days. I n late 1993, the surgeon David Nott travelled from his home in London to a hospital in war-torn Sarajevo on his first humanitarian mission.

Nott the brave shirt