Gifts from the Poor: What the World’s Patients Taught One Doctor About Healing

Travel with one of America’s most unconventional medical adventurers as he heals a wounded world. Surgeon and educator Glenn W Geelhoed has led medical students, residents, and physicians on more than two hundred health care missions to the developing world, including Africa, Asia, the South Pacific, and South America. Drawn from the author’s daily journals, Gifts from the Poor draws lessons about human resilience and global interdependence and describes how the rewards of helping those less fortunate can enrich the whole planet. An avid photographer, big game hunter, and marathon runner, the author takes readers on wild trips to some of the neediest places on earth, where the author’s aid is often met with unconventional gifts, such as live chickens or bull’s horns. From challenging his academic associates at George Washington University Medical Center to exposing the hypocrisy of the foreign aid game, the author does not flinch from conflict in his analysis of foreign aid. He describes how well-intentioned aid projects, both religious and secular, are often compromised by corrupt and broken governments. Realising that the world’s health problems defy simple fixes, Geelhoed’s book is the story of his mission to be a part of the true solution.