Kathmandu, April 15 -- Here in the mountains of far-western Nepal, the biggest threat to life and limb is gravity. Women collecting fodder fall from trees, boys grazing goats fall off cliffs, heavily loaded tractors plunge from dirt roads carved out of steep slopes.

There is nothing to be done about those who die on the spot. But for the severely wounded there is only one hospital: Bayalpata. And it is there that orthopaedic surgeon Mandeep Pathak is the last hope for many wounded people.

Pathak, 42, is too modest to tell us how many lives he has saved over the past 10 years he has worked at Bayalpata. But hospital records show he has performed more than 4,000 operations in the past decade, many of them so patients did not suffer perman...