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WORK TITLE: A Surgeon in the Village
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.tonybartelme.com/
CITY:
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COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
https://www.tonybartelme.com/about * http://www.postandcourier.com/features/surgeon-in-the-village-author-felt-many-pulls-to-write/article_81a44184-2056-11e7-937d-a77d1a84ee9a.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2016089060
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rda
Personal name heading:
Bartelme, Tony
Field of activity: Investigative reporting
Profession or occupation:
Journalists
Found in: The healing sun, 2016: title page (Tony Bartelme) dust
jacket flap (the senior projects reporter for The Post
and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina; a Nieman
Fellow at Harvard University in 2011; has won many
national journalism prizes for his investigative
reports)
================================================================================
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Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born 1963, in Minneapolis, MN; son of Joe and Margaret Bartelme; children: Luke.
EDUCATION:Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, B.S., 1984; Harvard University (graduated).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and investigative journalist. News-Piedmont, Greenville, SC, reporter, 1984-1990; Post and Courier, Charleston, SC, special projects reporter, 1990—.
AWARDS:Philip Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing, journalism category winner, 2006; Associated Press Managing Editors Award for international reporting, 2007; Gerald Loeb Award, 2008; Jesse Laventhol Prize for Deadline News Reporting, 2008; Southern Newspapers Publishers Association Best Local Story Award, 2008; Stokes Award for Best Energy Writing, National Press Association, 2008; Howard Nieman Foundation Fellowship, Harvard University, 2011; Sigma Delta Chi Award for National Reporting, 2013; Scripps Howard Foundation Award, 2016, as part of reporting team; APME Award for Public Service, 2016; Green Eyeshade Award for Feature Writing, 2017; Walter Sulilvan Award for Science Writing, 2017; Telly Award and Moscow Festival Special Award, for screenplay for Born to the Wind; recipient of more than fifty South Carolina Press Association Awards, 1985—, including Journalist of the Year; Pulitzer Prize, three-time finalist (2011, 2013, and 2016).
WRITINGS
Also author of the books Into the Wind: The Story of the World’s Longest Race (with Brian Hicks), 1999; The Bridge Builders and Charleston’s Grand New Span (with Jessica VanEgeren), 2005; and Second Chance: The Mark Stanford Story, 2013. Author of documentary screenplay Born to the Wind, about the 1998-99 Around Alone sailing race. Also author of a blog, Stories by Tony Bartelme.
SIDELIGHTS
Tony Bartelme is a writer and investigative journalist based in Charleston, South Carolina. He is the senior projects reporter for the Post and Courier, a Charleston newspaper. As a reporter, Bartelme has won multiple prizes for his journalism work, including more than fifty South Carolina Press Association Awards, including for journalist of the year. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times, either as a part of a reporting team or as an individual journalist. Bartelme holds a B.S. degree from the highly respected Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
For Bartelme, the ability to tell about the struggles and triumphs of real people through stories—in-depth news stories—is a critical part of the responsibilities of a journalist. Even though many news outlets today are less inclined toward supporting long-form, deeply researched stories, he credits the Post and Courier with still being an advocate of the type of journalism that can change lives. “I think that crafting rich narratives gets readers closer to the real thing,” he stated on the Tony Bartelme Website. Stories, he observed, “are how we make sense of the world” and how humans “transmit our beliefs and traditions.” In the right context, stories allow us to vicariously experience another person’s successes, struggles, and failures. By seeing how someone else reacted to a situation, we can apply what they learned to our own lives to make better decisions.
In A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa, Bartelme describes in detail a health crisis that occurred in Tanzania and what a dedicated medical professional did to alleviate it. The story, which originally appeared as a series in the Post and Courier, earned Bartelme one of his Pulitzer Prize nominations.
Dilan Ellegala, the main actor in Bartelme’s account, was a “thirty-seven-year-old burnt-out neurosurgeon” who went to Tanzania for a stint at Haydom Lutheran Hospital, noted Tony Miksanek in a Booklist review. Haydom was a busy medical facility of 400 beds. Ellegala quickly discovered a startling statistic: in a country of some forty-three million people, there were only three neurosurgeons. It was practically impossible for those who needed brain surgery or related specialist treatment to get the attention they needed. Ellegala knew that neither the well-intentioned aid coming into the country, nor the short-term medical missions that often went there, would be sufficient to bring enough neurosurgeons and other professionals to Tanzania. He set out to solve this problem by training others, particularly those without formal medical education or experience, in how to conduct life-saving surgeries and medical procedures.
“Bartelme followed Ellegala for four years, staying at the hospital where he worked, witnessing the dire conditions that made his mission so difficult. The result is a harrowing and important book that captures the tremendous health-care challenges facing East Africa and opens our eyes to a complicated global health problem: lack of access to safe, affordable surgery and anesthesia,” stated Washington Post Book World contributor Nazila Fathi.
Ellegala trained several people, including his medical assistant Emmanuel Mayegga, in how to perform brain surgery. Mayegga himself trained others, such as Emanuel Nuwas, in neurosurgical techniques. The idea, Ellegala realized, was to create experienced individuals who could train others and exponentially increase the number of those with neurosurgical skills. Everyone involved recognized the risks, but they knew it was better than the alternative: no neurosurgical care at all. Eventually, Mayegga and Nuwas completed medical school.
Throughout A Surgeon in the Village, Bartelme “writes knowingly of the dedication of a valiant doctor determined to change how modern medicine interacts with the world,” commented a Publishers Weekly writer. A Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded, “this is a fine book about a devoted doctor attempting to help Tanzanians help themselves. A highly inspirational story about sustainable global health measures.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2017, Tony Miksanek, review of A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa, p. 28.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2017, review of A Surgeon in the Village.
Nieman Reports, fall, 2016, profile of Tony Bartelme, p. 64.
Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), April 16, 2017, Stephanie Hunt, “Surgeon in the Village Author Felt Many Pulls to Write Tanzania Story,” profile of Tony Barthelme.
Publishers Weekly, January 30, 2017, review of A Surgeon in the Village, p. 195.
Washington Post Book World, May 12, 2017, Fathi, Nazila, “Improving Global Gealth, One Surgery at a Time,” review of A Surgeon in the Village.
ONLINE
Tony Bartelme Website, https://www.tonybartelme.com (October 31, 2017).
'Surgeon in the Village' author felt many pulls to write Tanzania story
By Stephanie Hunt Special to The Post and Courier Apr 16, 2017 (…)
'A Surgeon in the Village'
Post and Courier reporter Tony Bartelme has authored a new book called "A Surgeon in the Village."
Provided
Writers tend not to be numbers people, but Tony Bartelme did some quick math when he visited East Africa in 2010 to report a story on an MUSC neurosurgeon teaching there. In Tanzania he found an intoxicating landscape, intriguing people and a startling fact: this country of 42 million people had only three brain surgeons.
Even a writer knows that figure is out of whack.
And a writer as seasoned as Bartelme, a special projects reporter for The Post and Courier and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, knows when he’s found a good story.
“As soon as I landed in Tanzania and got a feel for it, especially for the village of Haydom, I realized there was an incredible richness and bigger story there,” Bartelme says.
He also was immediately struck by the charisma of his main character, Dr. Dilan Ellegala. He was a Sri Lankan Harvard-trained neurosurgeon who lived on Folly Beach, was on the faculty at MUSC, and did brain surgery in the African bush on the side, using crude tree saws and duct tape. Ellegala taught nonmedical Tanzanians how to do basic brain surgery, so the villages would have resources after medical volunteers, who swooped in for short visits, left.
“Sometimes you just kinda know,” Bartelme says. “Here’s this tall, striking guy with a shaved head. He has a surgeon’s clarity and leadership, but he’s a reluctant, flawed leader in some ways. I remember thinking this was a medical Michael Jordan. I knew I had a great person to write about.”
Bartelme’s recently published book, “A Surgeon in the Village — An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa” (Beacon Press), proves his instincts were right.
The book expands on the four-part series that Bartelme wrote for this paper in the spring of 2010 (earning him one of his Pulitzer nods), but takes readers deeper into the story, fleshing out characters’ personal histories that led them into medicine, to Africa, to being audacious enough to try to teach brain surgery to nonphysicians, and deeper into the broader issues of physician training and disparity of doctor supply.
“Once I met all the characters in the story and came back (from Tanzania) and wrote the series, I realized this large public issue of shortage of doctors has global impact,” Bartelme says. “OK, I’ve got more to say.”
But writing a book is “exponentially more difficult than writing a series,” Bartelme admits, and this book-writing journey entailed four additional trips to Tanzania and intense on-the-ground research.
“I really wanted to write a story that felt like reading a novel. Pulling that off means that if someone mentions they went to school under a tree, I had to find that tree to accurately describe it,” says Bartelme, who received a Harvard Nieman Fellowship enabling him to work on the project.
Bartelme’s investigative journalism background served him well, especially when he set out to find out how the patients operated on by Ellegala’s trainees fared. The patients were spread all across the bush, and Bartelme had no addresses to go on. Undaunted, he hired two guides, rented a hospital ambulance and set out to find them.
“I remember searching for one patient who’d been operated on after being hit in the head with a stick, and after hours of driving through muddy fields, hiking over hills and rivers, we find a hut and his wife says, ‘Oh he’s over there in another hut with his other wife,’ ” Bartelme recounts. “So more hills, more mud, more hikes, and the second wife tells us, ‘No, he’s over there, drinking with his buddy.’ So we go there, and a guy with spikes coming out of his sandals tells us our guy has been running from us all day. Finding the patients took days and days, and it was an absolute blast.”
Bartelme is pleased that this book is becoming part of a broader discussion on whether or not short-term medical mission trips are effective.
“The chorus is building that it’s better to teach essential surgeries than go in and do them and leave,” he notes.
And as a writer, the project was personally satisfying as well. “I like finding the stories that are hidden in plain sight,” Bartelme says. “Stories that people think they know but really don’t until they are portrayed in a certain way and the reader has that ‘a-ha.’ My ‘a-ha’ moment was realizing shortage of surgeons was one of the biggest global health stories that no one’s ever heard about.
About Tony Bartelme
Work
Charleston Post and Courier
Special Projects Reporter
The Post and Courier
Journalist
Education
Harvard University
2010 to 2011 · Cambridge, Massachusetts
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois
About Tony
I am senior projects reporter for The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., and this is my public Facebook Page.
I've stored some of my notable stories here:
http://bartelme.blogspot.com/
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Books
[A Surgeon in the Village]
A Surgeon in the Village
Tony Bartelme
I am an investigative reporter based in Charleston, South Carolina. Read these and other stories on www.postandcourer.com and contact me at tbartelme@postandcourier.com
Tony Bartelme
Born Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Occupation Journalist, Author
Tony Bartelme, an American journalist and author, is the senior projects reporter for The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. He has been a finalist for three Pulitzer Prizes.
Contents
1 Biography
2 Awards
3 Author
4 References
Biography
Bartelme was born in 1963, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father, Joe Bartelme, was an executive with NBC News until his death in 1991.[1] Bartelme's mother, Margaret, is a teacher. Bartelme's son, Luke, played the character "TJ" on Lifetime's drama "Army Wives" for four seasons.[2] Bartelme began his journalism career at The Greenville (South Carolina) News-Piedmont after earning a bachelor of science degree in 1984 from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. He has been with The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, since 1990.[3]
Awards
In 2016, Bartelme was part of a reporting team that won a Scripps Howard Foundation award for community journalism about an investigation into police shootings in South Carolina.[4] In 2016, Bartelme was a member of a reporting team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the breaking news reporting category for stories about the fatal shooting of Walter Scott.[5] In 2013, Bartelme's series about high insurance rates was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory writing and winner of the Sigma Delta Chi award for non-deadline reporting for papers with circulations between 50,000 and 150,000. In 2011, Bartelme was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his series[6] about a neurosurgeon's work to teach brain surgery in Tanzania. In 2010, Bartelme was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.[7] In 2009, Bartelme won the National Press Association's Stokes Award for Best Energy Writing.[8] In 2008, Bartelme won the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for a story about the effect of China's growth on local economies.[9] In 2006, Bartelme won the Journalism category in the Phillip Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment for his Post and Courier series on the ecological riches and the plight of the Francis Marion National Forest in coastal South Carolina, "Under Fire".[10] Bartelme won the 2007 Associated Press Managing Editors award for international perspective for newspapers under 150,000 circulation.[11] Bartelme has won more than 50 South Carolina Press Association Awards, including Journalist of the Year.
Author
Bartelme has written or co-written four books:
A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa, 2017, Beacon Press. Title in Canada: Send Forth the Healing Sun: The Unexpected True Story About Teaching Brain Surgery in the African Bush, 2016, HarperCollins/Canada.[12]
Second Chance: The Mark Sanford Story, 2013.[13]
The Bridge Builders and Charleston's Grand New Span, with Jessica VanEgeren, 2005.
Into the Wind: The story of the world's longest race, with Brian Hicks, 1999.[14]
He wrote the screenplay for Born to the Wind, a documentary narrated by Peter Fonda on the 1998-1999 Around Alone sailing race. The documentary won a Telly and Moscow Festival Special Award.[15]
When I begin work on a story, I ask myself: "What will I learn from it? What will others? What is this story’s universal wisdom?"
Stories are how we make sense of the world. They are how we transmit our beliefs and traditions.They are part of our hardwiring: Our brain’s mirror neurons help us experience another person’s successes and failures, which in turn allow us to take new and better paths.
Is there a better way to help newspaper readers to experience stories?
I think that crafting rich narratives gets readers closer to the real thing. After graduating with a journalism degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, I’ve spent the past 30 years writing stories, mainly for newspapers. Many of my stories involve a quest of one kind or another: A black man's search for redemption through the construction of a children's park (The Guardian); a doctor's quest to teach brain surgery in Africa (One Brain at a Time); an insurance executive's search for justice (The Insider). I also seek out subjects that have huge stakes but are difficult to understand, such as the beautiful and mysterious world of ocean plankton (Every Other Breath).
I try to use investigative and narrative storytelling techniques to put flesh on these stories. This is increasingly rare in newspapers. Fortunately, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Post and Courier supports in-depth narrative work. There, I've exposed a variety of complex community problems, from mercury poisoning to insurance boondoggles to questionable police shootings, often using narrative techniques to get those mirror neurons firing.
Honors
2017 AGU Walter Sullivan Award for Science Writing
2017 Green Eyeshade Award for Feature Writing
2016 Scripps Howard Awards
2016 APME Award for Public Service
2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Breaking News
2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Explanatory Reporting
2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing
2011 Harvard Nieman Fellowship
2013 Sigma Delta Chi Award for National Reporting
2009 National Press Foundation Stokes Award for Best Energy Writing
2008 Gerald Loeb Award for Business and Financial Journalism
2008 Southern Newspaper Publishers Association Best Local Story Award
2008 ASNE Jesse Laventhol Prize for Deadline News Reporting
2007 APME Award for International Reporting
2006 Phillip Reed Memorial Ward for Outstanding Writing
Since 1985, winner of more than 50 S.C. Press Association Awards, including Journalist of the Year.
A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa
Tony Miksanek
113.13 (Mar. 1, 2017): p28.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa.
By Tony Bartelme.
Mar. 2017. 288p. illus. Beacon, $26.95 (9780807044889). 617.4.
"The brain has more neurons than the Milky Way has stars." Impressive. As are the many "stars" who work at an African bush hospital and the magnitude of human warmth they emit. In 2006, a 37-year-old burnt-out neurosurgeon, Dilan Ellegala, traveled to Tanzania for a stint at a remote medical mission, Haydom Lutheran Hospital, a busy 400-bed facility supported chiefly by the Norwegian government. Despite a population of 43 million, Tanzania only had three neurosurgeons. As three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Bartelme reports, Ellegala quickly realized that traditional short-term medical missions were a Band-Aid remedy. A better solution involved teaching local health workers and encouraging them to be independent. Not only did he train a non-MD assistant medical officer at the hospital to perform neurosurgery (who in turn trained another person, who then taught brain surgery to someone else), Ellegala also helped create a nonprofit global-health initiative centered on medical teaching. Problem solving, improvising, and expressing compassion permeate this unusual and fascinating chronicle. As does failure, but as Bartelme makes clear, failure can offer opportunities for learning, healing, and seeking redemption.--Tony Miksanek
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Miksanek, Tony. "A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 28. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA488689447&it=r&asid=000e103a5dc4e341f08fdc6a46889b0c. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A488689447
Bartelme, Tony: A SURGEON IN THE VILLAGE
(Feb. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Bartelme, Tony A SURGEON IN THE VILLAGE Beacon (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 3, 28 ISBN: 978-0-8070-4488-9
The story of an American brain surgeon in Tanzania and the work he has done to develop surgeons in the East African country.In 2006, Dilan Ellegala, a Sri Lanka-born American citizen and gifted neurosurgeon, took a sabbatical at a missionary hospital in Haydom, Tanzania. His plan was to clear his head, practice a bit of medicine, and perhaps figure out what he wanted from his career and life. Immediately, he understood that he had entered a completely different world. Tanzania, a country of 43 million people, had only three neurosurgeons, and other specialties were similarly lacking. Ellegala knew that he could not fill the gap himself and that relying on visiting doctors was insufficient. So he decided to teach Emmanuel Mayegga, an assistant medical officer, how to conduct brain surgery. It was a risky gambit, but it seemed to work. Within a few years, Mayegga had gone to medical school and trained a protege, who in turn trained his own protege. Ellegala started a nonprofit based on the principle that Tanzanians should be primarily responsible for providing medical care to their countrymen. Post and Courier (Charleston, South Carolina) senior projects reporter Bartelme, a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist--including for the series of articles that provide the foundation for this book--tells the story of Ellegala and his personal and professional triumphs and struggles. The author writes fluidly and clearly admires his subject even as he acknowledges Ellegala's flaws. On the whole--but not always--Bartelme avoids the hoariest cliches about the Western hero in darkest Africa, though he has a tendency to try to make each one of his short chapters more portentous than some of them warrant. Nonetheless, this is a fine book about a devoted doctor attempting to help Tanzanians help themselves. A highly inspirational story about sustainable global health measures.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bartelme, Tony: A SURGEON IN THE VILLAGE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234385&it=r&asid=7e9b934e2c83e54ec9d6536b6105d13b. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234385
A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa
264.5 (Jan. 30, 2017): p195.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa
Tony Bartelme. Beacon, $26.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-8070-4488-9
At a time when so many nations lack proper medical care, Bartelme, the senior projects reporter for the Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., tells the story of courageous Dilan Ellegala, a talented Harvard-trained neurosurgeon, who seeks to bring meaning to his life with compassionate outreach. Bartelme takes the reader on the humanistic journey of the Sri Lanka native in his medical school training, his rotations of performing delicate operations in a New York facility, and his decision to take a position at an understaffed missionary hospital in Tanzania. Some of the segments in the biography are quite clinical in their graphic depictions of the history of brain medicine and the current procedures. The doctor explains the brain surgeon's view: "You were touching a person's past and dreams, everything a person is and would be." Tanzania has only three neurosurgeons for 43 million people, so Ellegala begins an effective training program with young medical workers in a new group, Madaktari, that's designed to prepare doctors to serve in the global health crisis. Noting the shortage of surgeons, Bartelme writes knowingly of the dedication of a valiant doctor determined to change how modern medicine interacts with the world. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa." Publishers Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 195. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480195240&it=r&asid=e8d7ecfaaa900a5d2157cb902dd17bd3. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480195240
Tony Bartelme
70.4 (Fall 2016): p64.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Harvard University, Nieman Foundation
Tony Bartelme is the author of a new book, "Send Forth the Healing Sun: The Unexpected True Story About Teaching Brain Surgery in the African Bush." It tells the story of U.S. neurosurgeon Dilan Ellegala who, after taking a sabbatical at a remote hospital in Tanzania, began NGO Madaktari, a group that sends hundreds of doctors around the world to create a new model for global health.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tony Bartelme." Nieman Reports, vol. 70, no. 4, 2016, p. 64. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479548274&it=r&asid=8a8b1147f9fca72fafbe07ab6fcb1f3e. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479548274
Book World: Improving global health, one surgery at a time
Nazila Fathi
(May 12, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Nazila Fathi
A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa
By Tony Bartelme
Beacon. 274 pp. $27.95
---
In 2006, when American doctor Dilan Ellegala arrived in Haydom, on the edge of Tanzania's Great Rift Valley, he uncovered a shocking reality: This country of more than 40 million people had only three neurosurgeons. All of them were in the capital, Dar es Salaam.
Ellegala, who had recently graduated from Harvard Medical School, was the first brain surgeon at Haydom Lutheran Hospital, a medical center that depended on volunteer doctors from Europe and the United States. The facility lacked the most basic surgical tools. Patients with head injuries or brain tumors healed on their own or died. The operating theater did not have a functional microscope; the light was too dim; patients under anesthesia were ventilated by an assistant squeezing an oxygen bag by hand. Every bed in the hospital was occupied. Some patients slept two to a bed; some slept on floors or benches outside the rooms.
In "A Surgeon in the Village," journalist Tony Bartelme recounts Ellegala's efforts to improve the medical system in Tanzania. Bartelme followed Ellegala for four years, staying at the hospital where he worked, witnessing the dire conditions that made his mission so difficult. The result is a harrowing and important book that captures the tremendous health-care challenges facing East Africa and opens our eyes to a complicated global health problem: lack of access to safe, affordable surgery and anesthesia. Bartelme says an estimated 17 million people die every year from conditions that could have been treated surgically.
Early on, Ellegala was forced to make some difficult decisions. One day, for example, an unconscious man was brought to the hospital; cerebrospinal fluid was leaking from his ear. Ellegala needed a Gigli saw, a $20 instrument used for cutting bones, to open the man's skull and save his life. The only one at the hospital was rusty and broken. Defeated, Ellegala decided to go out for a run to clear his mind. On his way, he came across a farmer who was cutting a tree limb with a wire saw. Ellegala bought the tool and rushed back to the hospital, where he sterilized it and used it to perform the surgery.
Ellegala saved the man's life, but a question haunted him: What happens after visiting doctors leave Haydom?
Ellegala couldn't cure every Tanzanian with his own two hands, so he tried the next best thing: training other surgeons. His first student was a Tanzanian medical assistant, Emmanuel Mayegga, whose education was comparable to that of a high school graduate in America. Over a few weeks, Ellegala taught Mayegga some brain surgery techniques and built his confidence to perform surgeries. It was a risky move, Bartelme admits, but, given "that millions of people had no access to even the most basic forms of neurosurgery," the options were limited. "Was it ethical," he asks, "to wait until a country built a stable of experienced surgeons, a process that might take decades, if it would happen at all?"
After Ellegala left Tanzania a few months later, Mayegga began operating on patients with head wounds. He helped another health-care worker, Emanuel Nuwas, to master the techniques and perform neurosurgery. Nuwas would also, as part of Ellegala's "train-forward" philosophy, teach others.
Ellegala, who also practiced in Portland, Ore., and later in Charleston, S.C., founded a nongovernmental organization called Madaktari Africa. It sends hundreds of doctors around the world to serve as mentors and to create a sustainable model for global health. To address concerns about instructing clinicians to perform complicated brain procedures, Ellegala encouraged Mayegga and Nuwas to attend medical school in Dar es Salaam. Both men returned to Haydom after completing their studies to advocate Ellegala's teach-first philosophy - a testimony that empowering people turns them into agents of change.
"Teaching has the power to change people's internal wiring, help them do things they never thought possible. And teaching is a universal value, as basic as a father teaching a son to tie his shoes, which means it can be a unifying force," Bartelme writes.
Bartelme argues that Ellegala's effort to build a functional health system, even though it means relying on locals who lack credentials required in the West, is more important than the humanitarian aid that has poured into Africa for decades. Such programs are well intentioned but keep low-income countries dependent.
The Ebola crisis in West Africa in 2014 underlined the importance of a health-care system that can stand on its feet. Nearly 95 percent of foreign health-care workers packed their bags after the Ebola outbreak, and the locals were left on their own to fight the deadly virus. "Hospitals and clinics closed; the disease spread to Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, and then the United States and Spain. West Africa's problem became the world's problem," Bartelme writes.
It wasn't until thousands had died that governments and humanitarian aid groups stood together to stop the disease. If African doctors had been empowered to fight it in the first place, Bartelme argues, the scale of the crisis would have been different.
"In a world of trauma and disease," he concludes, "destinies are often shaped by access to healers. And without this access, ripples of suffering can become waves." Training healers can stop that wave.
---
Fathi was a correspondent for the New York Times based in Tehran from 1999 to 2009 and is the author of "The Lonely War: One Woman's Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fathi, Nazila. "Book World: Improving global health, one surgery at a time." Washington Post, 12 May 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491594673&it=r&asid=23434e8092af749905b62af957778099. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491594673