The Careful Surgeon

A teenage victim of a knife attack. A young girl who has nearly lost her leg in a boating accident. A survivor of a major terrorist attack at Westminster Bridge. Trauma surgeon Shehan Hettiaratchy has seen all these people on his operating table. In The Careful Surgeon he explains how it feels to take the lives of these people into his hands.

In this powerful, blood-stopping and incisive insight into the life of a trauma surgeon, Shehan takes us into the heart of what it takes to train, practice, perform and – mostly – perfect his surgical skills. Through real-life case studies of patients, he explains how the emotional connection he makes with them must be set aside the moment he takes a knife to cut them open.

With unflinching honesty, he shows us how things can go wrong within a heartbeat and how, when the darkness sets in, he is able to get up and do it all over again. For, ultimately it is Shehan patients who show him the light – coping with the very worst life can throw at them, fighting their way back to life – and allow him to do the job he so loves.

Radiant with light and darkness, this is a book full of scenes of life and death that the rest of us rarely even glimmer.

Author Biography

Shehan Hettiaratchy is one of the UK’s leading surgeons, Major Trauma Director of one of the busiest trauma centres in London, Consultant Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Professor of Practice at Imperial College and National Advisor to the NHS on Armed Forces healthcare. He led the team treating victims of the Grenfell fire and the Westminster Bridge attack (as documented by BBC’s Hospital), among other tragic events that have occurred in recent years. He has been named as a Daily Mail Health Hero of the Year and included as part of The Times Alternative Rich List. He has served in the British Army since he left school as a regular and reservist, serving mainly with Airborne Forces, and was deployed to Afghanistan twice. He has worked in war zones (Abkhazia, Georgia, Chechnya, Kosovo) and disaster areas (the Haiti earthquake) with various UK NGOs. Since 2022 he has worked with UK-Med on surgical missions to Ukraine and Gaza. He was awarded an OBE in 2025 for his humanitarian work.