Published 10 December 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a2958
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a2958

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A chance of life

¹ London

The surgeon David Nott, a Christian who does regular voluntary work abroad, made headlines last week when he recounted how he used instructions sent by text message to do a forequarter amputation on a boy in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Here he tells the story in his own words

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Every year I volunteer to work for a month as a surgeon for Médecins Sans Frontières. I have worked for the charity since 1994, in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Chad, and Darfur, Sudan, and this year I was posted to work in the town of Rutshuru in the war torn eastern territories of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

On my first round I noticed a 16 year old boy lying almost motionless in one of the surgical wards. The surgeon that I had replaced had had to do an emergency left upper limb amputation for a severe injury several weeks previously. The cause of the injury wasn’t clear. I was told that it may have been a hippopotamus bite, but when he recently became better it was revealed that he had been caught in crossfire.

He was very septic and unwell. Taking down the dressings showed a . . . [Full text of this article]

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