THE FIELD MEDIC

摘要

It started with a minor cut. A rock had come loose during a palaeontological dig and grazed a worker's leg. But when Matthew Lewin checked on him several days later, an infection had spread to his blood. The man had a dangerously high fever and was close to kidney failure. The most serious complication, however, was his location: a remote sun-blasted corner of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, where he was working as part of a 2005 expedition searching for fossils from the Cretaceous period. Most patients in his condition would be admitted to a hospital's intensive-care unit. "With good roads it would have been a two-day drive to the nearest hospital," says Lewin. Where they were, the roads were terrible.