Here is an amazing Patriotic War diary of a world-renowned Russian heart surgeon. As a young medical graduate, Dr. Amosov volunteered for the front, where he was given charge of a horse-drawn mobile field hospital (PPG). The inexperienced young surgeon and his newly arrived staff of physicians and nurses were immediately innundated by masses of wounded. Working up to eighteen hours a day, they developed new lifesaving techniques under the most appalling aseptic and primitive conditions. As they continuously relocated with the fluctuating front, their "hospital" was hurriedly established in dugouts, peasant huts, barns, and burned-out buildings. Wounded arrived stacked on carts, packed into trucks and boxcars, or by ambulance-biplane, after having received only the most basic treatment from battlefield aidwomen. Under the roaring of artillery and aircraft, Dr. Amosov fought his own four-year war against hemorrhage, gaseous gangrene, frostbite, and lice. His grim accounts of injuries, suffering, and death are at times almost unbearable. But overall, his memoir is a tribute to the courage and determination of his Soviet people: his patients and overworked staff, heroes all. This is a truly inspiring book. It reads like a fast-paced novel. Those who enjoy true-life medical adventure stories will appreciate it. History buffs will recognize the locales and various defeats and victories of the Red Army, as PPG-2266 follows the front lines. From Barbarossa to the Fall of Berlin, Dr. Amosov's journal provides an unforgetable, physician's view of the Eastern Front and its cost in human lives.