"Live with no excuses and travel with no regrets." —Oscar Wilde
Improbable Journeys is the remarkable story of a life lived in keeping with Wilde’s precept—the life of physician and teacher Bernard Binns. As Binns’ friend Tony Brown said after reading this memoir: “You have led a fantastically interesting life, with a geographical journey like no other—from the Falklands and Kerala, to Srinagar and Kashgar, Suez and Gibraltar, Worksop, London and Oxford, Nigeria and Uganda, Winnipeg and the Arctic, San Francisco and Vancouver Island, and finally to your beloved Whakatane in New Zealand. You present your story as an education in itself. So many of your descriptions, perhaps in particular of ways of life in Canada, are so interesting to read, always with the knowledge that this is a real story.”
Born in the Falkland Islands during his father’s posting there with the Colonial Service, Binns would move with his family on subsequent postings first to India and then to Chinese Turkestan, the latter reached only after an arduous trek through the Himalayas. After the Second World War, he returned to Britain, enrolling in medical school at the University of London after completing high school. Later, Binns specialized in obstetrics and gynaecology at Oxford. Upon completing his training he worked in Uganda, just as Idi Amin was rising to power. Following a stint back in England he moved to Winnipeg with his wife Elaine (also a physician) and children, where he practiced obstetrics and gynaecology. Displeased with changes in medical administration, he returned to university in San Francisco, qualifying in infectious diseases just as the AIDS epidemic hit. His later career included a decade teaching at the University of Manitoba and trips to the Canadian Arctic, where he learned firsthand of the medical and social challenges facing the Inuit.
Improbable Journeys—part travelogue, part medical memoir—paints a remarkable portrait of people and places as well as answering the timeless question of what makes for a successful healer.
Industry Reviews
"This fascinating story records the adventurous life of Dr Bernard Binns (born 1934), a surgeon specialising in Obstetrics and Gynaecology and later in infectious diseases. Improbable Journeys, however, is not all about medical matters. It describes adventures that should appeal to anyone interested in travel, especially to places infrequently visited; also, to those interested in the way of life in such countries, or to those who just enjoy reading about the intrepid---a word which also applies to Dr Binns' wife, Elaine, herself a medical doctor. The literary style of Improbable Journeys is attractive, and the story is told in a compelling manner by the adventurer and his co-author, Ron Smith. Bernard Binns' extraordinary memory for details of past events makes each chapter uniquely captivating. The dual authorship with Smith has helped greatly when uncovering these memories, and in deciding what to include to create the book's magic." ---John Kenwright, formerly Nuffield Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Oxford University, in The Ormsby Review
"Dr. Bernard Binns' memoir, co-written with Ron Smith, is partly a travelogue and mostly a commentary on the teaching and practice of medicine.... The book takes the reader on a journey through parts of the world, many of which Binns visited in his childhood, that few of us will ever have the opportunity to visit... Binns' acute visual, auditory, and olfactory memories provide an abundance of detail presented in Ron Smith's understated and straightforward writing style that keeps the narrative flowing." ---May Wong, The Ormsby Review
