David Nott
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2016
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the surgeon, David Nott.
He works across three London hospitals performing general, vascular, trauma & reconstructive surgery. In addition, for the past two decades, he's spent several weeks every year working in conflict zones around the world for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Born in Carmarthen, Wales, he was brought up by his grandparents until he was four while his parents finished their training - his Welsh mother became a nurse, his Indo-Burmese father an orthopaedic surgeon. He studied medicine at St Andrews University and completed his medical and surgical training in Manchester and Liverpool before becoming a consultant general and vascular surgeon working in London.
He first volunteered to go into a war zone in 1993 when he travelled to Sarajevo. Since then he has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Chad, Haiti, Yemen, Nepa, Gaza and Syria. In 2016 he and his wife, Elly, set up the David Nott Foundation, a charity which funds the training of local doctors to work in conflict zones and hostile environments. Producer: Cathy Drysdale.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:10.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:17.0 | Radio 4. My castaway this week is the surgeon David Naught. For most of the year he's busy |
| 0:39.2 | bicycling across London scrubbing up and going about the everyday business of saving people's lives. |
| 0:44.8 | Indeed, he's one of Britain's top vascular surgeons, carrying out three different kinds of surgery |
| 0:50.0 | at three different hospitals. It seems, however, that that's not quite enough to keep him occupied because for more than 20 years he's also taken time away from this demanding role in our |
| 1:05.0 | in NHS to work in the world's crisis zones. |
| 1:04.0 | Among them, Darfur, Sierra Leone, the Congo, Afghanistan and Syria. |
| 1:09.0 | All countries that have at times been war-torn hellholes, |
| 1:12.6 | riven by savage destruction and brutal suffering. |
| 1:16.0 | The official term for his makeshift operating room |
| 1:19.6 | amid the carnage of war is a surgically austere environment. In practice, it's not just the dirt, |
| 1:26.4 | lack of instruments and low blood supplies that have to be coped with, but also that medical facilities |
| 1:31.8 | and doctors are increasingly victims of missile attacks. |
| 1:36.0 | Being a medic runs in the family his Welsh mother was a nurse, his Indobermi's father, an orthopedic surgeon. |
| 1:42.0 | In fact, it was a trip with his dad to the cinema |
| 1:45.4 | that first sparked his interest in life on the front line. The movie was the Killing Fields. |
| 1:51.1 | He says, when you go so far and have come close to death and cheated it, you get an |
| 1:56.4 | amazing adrenaline buzz. It sounds a bit crazy, but there's an element of risk-taking that's |
| 2:01.6 | not enjoyable, but it's euphoric it's like a drug so |
| 2:05.7 | um welcome David not that idea that proximity to death can somehow make us feel more |
... |
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