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| Dilan Ellegala (left), the central character in "A Surgeon in the Village," supervising brain surgery in Tanzania. Photo: Tony Bartelme |
This was originally published on Global Health TV on August 3, 2017.
“In early 2010 Bill Hawkins, then executive editor of the
Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, told me, ‘I met this crazy
brain surgeon who opened a guy’s head with a wire saw in Africa. Check him out.
Maybe we’ll send you to Tanzania.’ Not many reporters get such an invitation,
but thanks to Bill, I was soon on my way.’”
So writes Tony Bartelme in “A Surgeon in
the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa,” an
informative and highly engaging book about a neglected area of global health –
the dearth of surgeons in low- and middle-income countries. The book, published
in March, is based on hundreds of hours of interviews that the author conducted
in the U.S. and during five trips to Tanzania between 2010 and 2015.
When I started reading this book, I approached it as an
obligation – something I had to do to inform myself, and possibly my readers, about
an area of global health I knew nothing about.
But to my great surprise, I not only found it informative, I
enjoyed it. The book is written in short chapters and in more of a novelistic
style than most pieces of non-fiction. What I thought would be a chore turned
into a pleasure. Perhaps that is because Bartelme is an experienced journalist
who knows how to tell a good yarn.
