George Sava

Described as a "Russian exile", he was born George Alexis Bankoff on 15 October 1903. The grandson of Countess Sophia Sergeyevna Ignatieva and Count Alexei Pavlovich Ignatiev (Russian: граф Алексей Павлович Игнатьев), the former governor of Siberia, who was assassinated in 1906 for his perceived role in a plot to overthrow the Tsar, Sava's life was devoted to surgery and the pursuit of his literary ambitions. He wrote approximately 120 books under the pseudonyms George Sava, George Borodin, George Braddon, Peter Conway, Alec Redwood, and others as well as numerous non-fictional books on surgical techniques under his real name. His father was a Bulgarian who, at a time when Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire, migrated to Russia. He was a lieutenant in the White Russian Navy when he was seventeen. He was forced to perform emergency surgery without any medical training that saved the life of a comrade, which induced him to pursue a career in medicine and become a surgeon.

He died on 15 March 1996, and was survived by five children.

He was the author of numerous books of medical autobiography, politics, history, and fiction.

His book, One Russian's Story, a biography of his father Ivan, tells something of his own life as well.

He was the author of the novel, Valley of the Forgotten People, which was published in London by Faber and Faber in 1941. The novel "They Came by Appointment" came soon after and is somewhat autobiographical.

In November 1942, Faber and Faber in London published his account of the Chetnik resistance movement in Serbia headed by General Draza Mihailovich, The Chetniks. Sava described the book in the Preface:

"The names of friends I have re-christened. I have altered dates and changed the names of places. This much is fiction: the rest is fact. The subsequent exploits of the guerrillas, the Chetniks, I have reconstructed from letters and reports. But I have a story to tell, and I shall not delay in the telling." (Preface, p. 8, The Chetniks, 1942)

He is also the author of The Healing Knife: A Surgeon's Destiny (1938). This book is an account of his life and his struggle to rise to the top of the medical profession from absolutely nothing.

In A Surgeon Remembers (1953), Sava recounted his most memorable operations. The dust jacket reads:

"What sort of cases are those which, most clearly, a surgeon remembers? This book of case histories by George Sava suggests an answer to that question. In terms of organs and limbs and in terms of people, the cases described and recorded here are as varied as any reader could wish. At the same time, as his Prologue and Epilogue and his commentaries show, each of them had something in common which presented the surgeon-author with a particular dilemma. It was not the consideration of the human factor, although this weighed heavily on his mind. It was the fact that these were all cases for which no clear-cut solution was to be found either in the textbooks or the canons of professional practice."

The Healing Knife: A Surgeon's Destiny (1938) this book is translated in Marathi as 'jeevandaata' (paerson who gifts lives)