Surgical Ward 9

Synopsis

In the final days of World War I and the Ottoman Empire, an unnamed fifteen-year-old boy, suffering from severe bone tuberculosis, drifts from doctor to doctor, unwilling to follow their advice. As his despair and incurable condition trap him in a lonely, fevered solitude, he seeks solace in a platonic infatuation with an older girl, Nuzhet. Surgical Ward 9 is one of the most raw and honest accounts ever written of a sick person's inner world -his envy, longing, ambition, disappointment, terror, hope, and despair, all caused by his illness and frailty.