In January of this year, the world’s most experienced war surgeon was working in St Mary’s, Paddington, when he learned that Russian troops had gathered on the Ukrainian border. That surgeon, David Nott, knew exactly what to do. Within 10 days of the war’s start, he had put together a 12-hour Zoom course, with famed neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, to teach surgeons essential techniques on how to deal with war injuries – fragmentation wounds, burns, mass casualties. The course has been viewed by 1,000 surgeons in Ukraine so far and has saved many lives.
Three months later Nott was there. “I worked in operating rooms in Zitoma that had no windows because they had all been blown out by cruise missiles, and I had 20 surgeons watching who were very happy to see me [because] they had patients with terrible injuries; someone with his shoulder shot off, holes in people’s legs – injuries they just didn’t know how to treat.”
“I don’t know how this is going to turn out,” he says. “I don’t think Putin will ever stop trying to get Ukraine. There is potential for it to continue for years to comebut I do think the situation is changing for the better now and hopefully it will come to an end much faster with significant western aid.”
Nott has been going to war zones for 30 years. He first went to the front line in 1993, to Sarajevo with Doctors Without Borders, and since then he has completed 32 missions in 21 different areas and received an OBE for his work. He has written a bestselling memoir, War Doctor, and moved people to tears on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2016, when he spoke of meeting the Queen shortly after returning from Syria. Overwhelmed by trauma, he found he could no longer speak during lunch if he sat next to her; she suggested they spend 20 minutes together feeding the corgis instead. “The Queen’s keen observation and kindness after my return from Aleppo will remain with me forever,” he says now. “It was an example of her ability to cheer people up in times of need.”
Nott is no stranger to traumatic incidents – he recounts the time in Sarajevo when the ambulance he was traveling in was hit by snipers; the operation in Syria when the object he removed from a woman’s leg turned out to be a detonator; the moment when the nurse standing next to him in Yemen was struck down by a bullet, or how several members of IS showed up in an operating room in Aleppo to follow his operation on one of their fighters.