Doktor Zosia with delivery to Ireland

When Dr Zofia Nibużanka is offered a job at the Ujazdów Hospital in Warsaw, she does not hesitate for a moment. This military medical institution welcomes women doctors with open arms and treats them as equals of their male colleagues. For Zofia it is a chance to improve her knowledge and skills in many thriving medical departments and modern laboratories. She learns the secrets of radiology, neurology, haematology and other specialisms, which will one day help her become an excellent paediatrician, although in her heart of hearts she dreams of surgery. Her work alongside the most outstanding specialists of the day is cut short by the outbreak of war. The Republic of Ujazdów, as the medics call their hospital, operates under the Hague Convention, but its provisions are ruthlessly broken by the occupier, and the staff, especially the doctors and nurses involved in the resistance, experience the exceptional cruelty of war. The officer corps is deported to the East and vanishes without trace. Only years later will the world hear of Katyn. Some of the doctors die in bombing raids, others are sent to concentration camps, shut up in the ghetto or tortured in the Gestapo's torture chambers. The survivors, among them Dr Zosia, try to save their patients in conditions that offend human dignity. It is all the harder for the young doctor because her husband joins the resistance and bad news about the fate of her loved ones reaches her all the time. The worst, however, is still to come, with the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising. Pre-war Warsaw comes to life in the novel: the fates of fictional characters are interwoven with real events in which eminent artists, politicians and scientists of the interwar period took part. As in the previous volumes of the series, the novel presents portraits of genuine giants of medicine, such as Sigmund Freud, Alois Alzheimer and Kazimierz Funk. Doktor Zosia is the last part of the series Uczniowie Hippokratesa, which combines a fictional story with groundbreaking events in the history of medicine. Doktor Zosia is an exceptional book. The fortunes of the main heroine are interwoven here with the story of the Ujazdów Hospital, which has never before been described so extensively and in such detail, and whose history could be called "the history of Poland in a nutshell". With the trilogy Uczniowie Hippokratesa, Ałbena Grabowska has achieved something great: she has freed the history of medicine from the textbooks and made it accessible to everyone. After Thorwald, who brought the history of world medicine closer to readers, Grabowska describes the history of Polish medicine, and does so in a way that makes it impossible to put down. Dr Krzysztof Królikowski, President of the Association of the former Ujazdów Hospital Ałbena Grabowska is a Polish woman of Bulgarian descent, a neurologist with a second-degree specialisation and a doctorate. Once devoted solely to her patients (especially those suffering from epilepsy), for ten years she has been an author of novels for adults and children. She enjoys turning to different literary genres. Among other things she wrote the saga Stulecie Winnych, on which a popular TV series was based, and the social novels Kości proroka (Marginesy 2018) and Matki i córki (Marginesy 2019), as well as Uczniowie Hippokratesa, a series of novels with elements of the history of medicine, comprising the volumes Doktor Bogumił (Marginesy 2020) and Doktor Anna (Marginesy 2021). She lives in Brwinów with her three children, two cats and a dog.