Medieval tools for 'haunting' injuries: How one American surgeon is bringing his skills to Ukraine
The first time Connor Berlin scrubbed into theater at Ukraine’s Mechnikov Hospital, he was given a hand-cranked neurosurgical drill that’s long been outmoded in the United States. The American’s task: using this “medieval” tool to operate on a Ukrainian soldier with horrific head injuries from a suspected land mine.
“His left eye socket was totally destroyed, completely gone, and we had to reconstruct that entirely,” said Berlin, 30, a resident brain surgeon at the University of Virginia, who is using his vacation time to volunteer in the city of Dnipro, less than 70 miles from the front line of Ukraine’s war against Russia. “Some of the traumatic injuries to soldiers we’re seeing every day here are unlike anything you will ever see in the United States.”
“The gruesomeness of what one man can do to another, it can be haunting,” he said.
Born in New York, Berlin is indelibly linked with Ukraine through his Jewish faith and his ancestors, who fled the country following a murderous, antisemitic pogrom more than 100 years ago. Today he believes he is the only neurosurgery resident from the U.S. operating there, giving him rare insight for an American into the human cost of the worst fighting in Europe since the end of World War II.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-ukraine-war-us-surgeon-medieval-tools-injuries-operations-rcna96597
Slava heroyam! (not all of them are wielding weapons of war)
= new reply since forum marked as read
