George Sava

George Sava, born George Alexis Bankoff on 15 October 1903 and died on 15 March 1996, was a British surgeon of Russian origin who was also a prolific writer. Described as a Russian exile, he is said to have turned to medicine after performing emergency surgery on a comrade while a young lieutenant in the White Russian Navy, without any medical training. He lived and worked in London from the 1930s and, during the Second World War, did some secret plastic surgery work for the Special Operations Executive. Under his real name he wrote non-fiction on surgical techniques, among them The Practice of Local Anaesthesia, Plastic Surgery and The Story of Plastic Surgery. Under the pen name George Sava and several others he wrote about 120 books, including medical memoirs such as The Healing Knife, A Surgeon Remembers and The Years of the Healing Knife, as well as novels and histories. He was survived by five children.