‘Brave, compassionate and inspiring – it left me in floods of tears’ Adam Kay, author of This Is Going to Hurt

For more than twenty-five years, David Nott has taken unpaid leave from his job as a general and vascular surgeon with the NHS to volunteer in some of the world’s most dangerous war zones. From Sarajevo under siege in 1993, to clandestine hospitals in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, he has carried out life-saving operations and field surgery in the most challenging conditions, and with none of the resources of a major London teaching hospital.

The conflicts he has worked in form a chronology of twenty-first-century combat: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Darfur, Congo, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Gaza and Syria. But he has also volunteered in areas blighted by natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal.

Driven both by compassion and passion, the desire to help others and the thrill of extreme personal danger, he is now widely acknowledged to be the most experienced trauma surgeon in the world. But as time went on, David Nott began to realize that flying into a catastrophe – whether war or natural disaster – was not enough. Doctors on the ground needed to learn how to treat the appalling injuries that war inflicts upon its victims. Since 2015, the foundation he set up with his wife, Elly, has disseminated the knowledge he has gained, training other doctors in the art of saving lives threatened by bombs and bullets.

War Doctor is his extraordinary story

Accounts of brutality fill the history of warfare. The behavior of any human being is, of course, a very complex phenomenon, whether in war or in peace. Historians in large part have described in detail the actions of military groups that have committed brutalities, but have not dealt with the factors that contributed to those actions. After examining the collective behavior of six military groups, representing different combat actions in different periods, some unexpected similarities became clear. While these groups were in very different situations and operated during different periods in history, there are similar factors that allowed the members of these groups to kill men, women and children in cold blood, and to commit acts of unspeakable brutality. After a close analysis of these military groups, five principle factors that had the greatest influence, either directly or indirectly, on these soldiers have been identified. Together, the factors supported each other and crystallized into a modus operandi that resulted in atrocities and bestial acts on civilians. This is the first book to identify the factors that lead to some of the most horrific cruelty in history, and to predict the actions of future groups given similar circumstances.