Bamboo Doctor

A harrowing account of one man's fight against death and disease in the Japanese hell-camps during the war in the Pacific. Perfect for fans of Laura Hillenbrand, William Meffert and Alex Kershaw.

Thousands of Allied prisoners-of-war died building the infamous Bangkok-Burma railroad. Many of those who survived owed their lives to the efforts of doctors like Stanley Pavillard.

Their captors looked on with callous indifference as dysentery and disease ripped through the camps while Pavillard and his fellow doctors carried out life-saving operations in brutal conditions: giving blood-transfusions with jam-jars and unclean syringes, removing appendixes by candlelight, operating with razors and bent spoons and going to any length to get the drugs and food which kept so many of the sick and starving prisoners precariously on their feet until the end.

Pavillard's memoir Bamboo Doctor is a stark but inspiring record of the triumph of humanity in even the most difficult circumstances.

'conditions such as POWs can rarely have experienced anywhere on this earth since the Middle Ages' Yorkshire Evening News

'Frank, factual... highly realistic ... a record of what human spirit can surmount' Liverpool Daily Post

'On the side of the captors, it is a disgraceful story; on the side of the doctors a heroic one' The Irish Press

'By his professional skill and his ingenuity in finding some way to defeat the odds against him, he saved many from perishing miserably in mud and filth.' Survivor