A Wilder Life

April 1, 2021
A doctor shares her medical adventures in wild places. Louwrens begins her globe-trotting memoir in 1980 in Swaziland, delivering a graphic description of an ambulance ride with a sugarcane worker who'd been run over by a tractor. "The stagnant air trapped in the back of the ambulance reeks of past calamities," she writes evocatively. From that introduction, the narrative gallops along, taking readers to the author's many medical posts in remote areas across the planet. Among other experiences, she writes about her time aboard an icebreaker heading toward Antarctica, a stint in the Australian Outback, and her work as a doctor during a 10,500-kilometer biking expedition that ran from Istanbul to Beijing along the Silk Route. At each post, she offers compassionate, memorable stories of her patients and their injuries and ailments: crushed fingers, uncontrolled bleeding, rabies, suicidal ideation, and even dental work, with which she had little experience. Throughout the text, Louwrens revels in the natural world around her, even during difficult journeys. For example, she remained exhilarated and awed by the power of the ocean even as she and her fellow shipmates endured seasickness while traversing some of the most dangerous waters in the world. She was also clearly fascinated by the birds and other wildlife she encountered. The author's prose is concise and conversational, with solid dialogue and descriptions that place readers in the moment and effectively brief historical backgrounds on each locale. Despite her ability to handle each emergency, Louwrens, impressively talented yet humble, managed to second-guess herself prior to accepting new posts, constantly hounded by "the demon of incompetency," which "whispered taunts in my ears." The photos and maps are welcome bonuses to the page-turning narrative, which is sure to delight armchair adventurers and medical enthusiasts alike. Boisterous, exciting true tales of a fearless doctor traversing the seas to help people all around the world.

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