Dispatch from India

The puzzle was how the surgeons in India do it. Take a town like Nanded, 400 miles east of Mumbai (as Bombay is now called), in the center of India. The public hospital in Nanded serves a district of 1400 villages and 2.3 million people. It has 500 beds, three operating rooms and, I found when I visited, just nine general surgeons. (Think Washington, D.C., with just nine surgeons.) Its two main buildings are four stories high and made of cement and stucco. Surgeons arrive each morning to a crush of several hundred people pressing their way into the clinics. . . .