Review: "Bamboo Doctor" by Stanley Pavillard

Bamboo Doctor by Stanley Pavillard
First published 1960
★★★★

First published in 1960, Bamboo Doctor is the memoir of a British doctor who was deployed in the Pacific during WWII and spent several years in POW camps, mostly in what is now Thailand. Conditions were, at best, grim: limited rations (when they were allotted food at all); backbreaking work; no clean water; violence; disease after disease after disease. Pavillard was determined to survive and determined that as many of the men under his medical care as possible would do the same, but that was no small task.

I picked this up out of curiosity and didn't realize the time frame in which it was written until well after I'd started reading (since the ebook edition was of course published much more recently than 1960!). Pavillard's telling draws on his diaries, I think, and the immediacy of the telling is gripping. So much happened—so many outbreaks, so many deaths, so much danger—that he rarely dwells long on individual events, instead letting the sum of it all tell the story.

Worth noting that the book is a product of its time and the context of the war; racism against the Japanese is present and pervasive in the book. That said, it is less than I was prepared for (...having read books written in similar time periods about WWII), and Pavillard takes care to distinguish his captors from noncaptors, and also to distinguish crueller captors from kinder ones. So know your own tolerance for that sort of thing, but also, the bar is low (see: previous parenthetical), and this is better than many within its context.

War is in the news a lot these days; or perhaps war has never not been in the news. It's troubling to think how many of the circumstances that Pavillard describes are still, or likely still, the case—illness endemic in POW camps; camps built next to military installations (and thus likely to end up as targets); cruelty so often overshadowing humanity. Pavillard survived, I think, in large part because of an ability to be creative and to think outside the box (or outside the barbed wire, perhaps); he also mentions more than once that keeping in generally good spirits was fundamental to survival for the prisoners, and that comes through in the book.

Not at all what I'd expected, and it provided a great deal of food for thought; worth the read, especially if you have Kindle Unlimited.