The quiet hero who humbles us all
He’s the NHS surgeon who risks his life in deadly war zones. But, as the Queen found out, his selflessness has taken a heavy toll
quake last summer. However since Molly was born in July, his instinct for self-preservation has sharpened.
‘ Fatherhood is an amazing discovery,’ he says, still mildly bemused. ‘Having had no one for so long, I now have my two little Nottlettes. My two girls. I keep say-ing: “I don’t know where these girls have come from!” ’
His austere bachelor flat — when she first visited, Elly was aghast that it contained little other than a bed and David’s rucksack — has been transformed into a home.
A framed print commemorating their wedding in January 2015 reads: ‘If I know what love is, it is because of you.’
They have also set up the David Nott Foundation, with Elly as chief executive, to train medical and nurs-ing teams in the skills they need to work in conflict and disaster areas.
‘It’s the legacy I am trying to leave,’ David says. ‘To be a war surgeon is a fine art, knowing the right thing to do for a patient with what’s available. If you do too much, that patient will die as surely as if you do too little.’
David, it seems, was predestined to work in medicine. The son of an Indo-Burmese father, also a surgeon, and a Welsh mother, he spent the first four years of his life living with his maternal grandparents in Carmarthenshire while his mother qualified as a nurse.
He began his humanitarian work in 1993 when, as a newly qualified con- sultant surgeon,surgeon he flew to Bosnia to work in the ‘Swiss cheese hospital’ — so called because it had been bombed so many times it was full of holes.
‘I’d seen a man on TV crying as he searched for his daughter among the rubble after a bomb blast in Sarajevo. I made a snap decision. I was over-whelmed by the necessity to help.’
He has since learned to improvise; to draw on skills he did not know he possessed. In 2008, he amputated the infected shoulder of a Congolese man, receiving instructions from colleagues in England by text.
Two years later, he rescued a Haitian baby from the rubble of the earthquake that killed more than 200,000, then cajoled the authorities into allowing her to come to London for life-saving surgery.
When IS terrorists armed with AK47 rifles burst into his operating theatre as he was trying to save the life of one of their own in Syria, he went on repairing the man’s pulmonary artery, his hand unwaver-ing even as his legs turned to jelly.
‘I knew they’d take me out if they knew I was a Christian. I prayed to God to help me through it, to keep my hand stable,’ he recalls. ‘The Syrian surgeon with me said, “Please do not disturb the senior surgeon.” ’
The gunmen left and David lived. Unpalatable though it may seem, he says he is bound to save any life he can. ‘The IS man I operated on was a mad fundamentalist extremist. But perhaps he may have learnt afterwards that a Christian surgeon saved his life, and hopefully it might have changed his views,’ he says.
His compassion is hard-wired. I do not believe he will ever stop going to areas of distress and conflict where his help is needed most.
‘I don’t think I could go to Aleppo again,’ he concedes. ‘That said, the only way to train surgeons to work in war zones is to go out and do opera-tions with them.
‘So with Elly’s blessing, I’ll still go, but to hospitals that aren’t on the front line. From now on,’ he promises, ‘I’ll stick to safer places.’