Burma Surgeon

A book to bracket with Jack Belden's Retreat With Stilwell -- the two together giving an amazingly well rounded picture of those fearful weeks of defeat and retreat as the Japanese hordes fanned out over Burma and Malaya. Burma Surgeon is more than a war story, however, more than a graphic picture of one phase of the war. It is a personal record of a medical missionary, whose life work lay along strange paths, as he established hospitals and jungle stations throughout the very section of southeastern Asia now in Japanese hands. Supplies and assistance were at a premium, but he trained native girls as nurses, he improvised, and broke with the canons of his profession, and won the confidence and loyalty and devotion not only of his fellow workers, but of the reluctant patients, whom at first he had to cajole from the highways and byways. It is an absorbing story, relieved by touches of humor, of pathos, highlighted with human interest. - Kirkus Review.