Have you ever wondered, after a hard week at work, why you decided to become a doctor? If so, you might want to read this book. It should make any woes you might have pale into insignificance. It might also lead you to reflect on the continuing significance of the Hippocratic oath. In this gripping true story Khassan Baiev, a surgeon from Chechnya, has provided his own interpretation of Hippocrates' ancient touchstone of medical ethics. Part autobiography, part history lesson, part drama, the book is a page turner not because of its literary style (Baiev cannot speak English, and his translators have, whether by accident or design, left his somewhat naive style undoctored) but because of the horrific reality of its content.
Figure 1.
Khassan Baiev (with Ruth and Nicholas Daniloff)
Simon & Schuster, £17.99, pp 354 ISBN 0 7432 2011 0
Rating: ★★★
To the great Russian bear the republic of Chechnya is a troublesome tick of a nation of a million mostly Muslim people stuck in its Caucasian underbelly—a politically volatile, oil rich interface between the Muslim and Christian worlds. Chechnya's struggle for independence goes back to the 16th century, and the consequent cycle of Chechnyan resistance and Russian repression has led to some of the worst (but largely under-reported) atrocities of recent times. By 1994 political instability and consequent lawlessness in Chechnya gave the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, the excuse he needed to invade. The attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001 provided further political cover for Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, to order a second Russian invasion in 2000, this time with overwhelming force, resulting in the levelling of the once beautiful capital, Grozny.
At the start of the first invasion in 1994 Baiev had a choice: to join the medical exodus (and pursue a lucrative career in plastic surgery in Moscow) or to remain in Grozny as a general surgeon and help the civilian population. He remained out of loyalty to his Hippocratic oath. By the peak of the second war in 2000 Baiev was the only doctor working in his home town of Alkhan Kala, which had been absorbing the devastated human exodus from Grozny. In one 48 hour period Baiev performed 74 operations (67 amputations and seven brain operations) using a blunt carpenter's saw and ordinary sewing thread. He describes shattered children and heroic pensioners. Baiev's perspective on the combatants is particularly telling. He is not partisan and dealt equally with the callousness of the Chechen fighters and that of the Russians. He was almost executed by soldiers from both sides, on several occasions. His subsequent mental health problems and his escape as a political refugee to the United States provide a further dramatic twist.
This book is a testimony to Baiev's fortitude and to the potential uniqueness of the doctor's role. As Baiev says: “War reveals a person's true character.”