Everyone reading this who has had cataract surgery appreciates the second chance at vision that surgery provided, and they as well as readers with the good fortune of good eyesight cherish the opportunity to see goodness in the world. That’s one of several reasons why “Second Suns,” a book by David Oliver Relin is a nourishing read for everyone who endeavors to see the world more clearly. The world as it is, with more than seven billion imperfect humans struggling to survive on a planet that cannot and a human community that will not sustain them (us) in dignity, equality and good health, is a better and more inspiring place because of David Relin and the two central men of this story, Sanduk Ruit and Geoffrey Tabin.
Ruit was born into poverty in a remote mountain village of Nepal, a week’s walk away from the nearest school. Ruit’s obvious intelligence as a young boy inspired his family to arrange for him to be schooled in India, an education they could not afford without help and that began with an arduous 15 day walk with his father from his village to be left alone in a foreign land. He chose medicine as a field of study because of three siblings whose early deaths could have been prevented with access to medical care in developed countries, and within a few years of becoming an ophthalmologist Ruit had revolutionized cataract surgery in the poorest countries on earth.
Tabin, an American, is Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah. He graduated from Yale where he was captain and a star player on the tennis team, earned a Masters in Philosophy at Oxford and received his MD from Harvard. He is a well known and highly accomplished climber and the 4^th person to have climbed the seven summits, the highest points on each continent, including, of course, Everest. He dropped out of medical school several times to go on climbing expeditions and somehow managed to get back in, and, according to Relin, “…tended to dance along the border of socially acceptable behavior.” He once recited an obscene poem to a group of medical school students, and his life experience, culture, personality, athleticism, opportunities and private life are as different from Ruit’s as, say, Kathmandu is from Cambridge.
Still, the two of them managed to team up (Ruit as mentor, Tabin as acolyte) to change and redefine the meaning and possibilities of modern medicine in the undeveloped countries of the world. Nepal, one of the world’s poorest countries has one of its highest rates of cataracts, and since Ruit opened the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology in Kathmandu in 1994 nearly 200,000 (mostly) destitute Nepalese have had their eyesight restored. Ruit and Tabin have trained hundreds of ophthalmologists and established centers in India, China, Tibet, Bhutan and Africa and thereby restored sight (and hope, smiles and life itself) to hundreds of thousands of people.
“Second Suns” informs, inspires and resonates for several reasons at multiple levels, including the examples of two doctors and the writer who tells their story of living according to the human ethic of how much they are able to contribute to the world rather than the material standard of how much they can extract from it.