Jane Wilson-Howarth
As a child Jane dreamed of intrepid adventures and encounters with exotic wildlife but it wasn’t until she was 22 and with a zoology degree to her credit that she started travelling: she organised a six-month expedition to catalogue the creatures living in Himalayan caves. To cut a very long story short, this trip lead to a parasitology then medical qualification, a husband and many more exotic trips. She experienced leeches, malaria mosquitoes, ticks and scorpions first hand and, realising how good information contributes to enjoyable travel, wrote her first travel health guide, "Bugs Bites & Bowels", which will launch in a sixth edition in March 2022 as "Staying Healthy When You Travel". Her first book was a travel narrative, "Lemurs of the Lost World". So far, nine of her books have been books published.
Dr Jane has lived in various very remote corners of the globe and has spent about 13 years in South Asia. Jane’s third son made his first big trip – to Nepal – at the age of three weeks. Her experiences of living in rural Nepal proved a rich resource for her writing as her travel biography, first novel and adventure stories for children bear witness.
She practised as a general practitioner / family physician for 15 years in Cambridgeshire and boasts more letters after her name than in it; she teaches extensively on travel health including an annual commitment to a workshop on diarrhoea at the University of Cambridge medical school. She has written a health feature for Wanderlust magazine since it was first launched in 1993 and her words have been published in national newspapers and the academic press. She is proud to have a tale in two of Bradt's anthologies "To Oldly Go" and "Kidding Around", and also several in "Fifty Camels and She's Yours.".
In September 2017 she moved back to Nepal and is dividing her time between Kathmandu and Cambridge. Her Nepal photos are on Instagram @longdropdoc and she tweets (occasionally) also as @longdropdoc. Her blogs are on her author website www.wilson-howarth.com where there are photogalleries relating to her books.
“GPs are almost the only doctors these days who understand all problems, can see the whole person…spend time with the dying…see things through to the end.”
“Even doctors — or perhaps especially doctors — need to be touched by something personally to understand the suffering of others. We’ve been taught about the enormous power over life and death that is invested in us; we can be deluded into thinking we are almighty. Almost instinctively we view death, incurable disease and disability as challenging our power. We forget that this is all part of life. I guess that we have to defend ourselves against the human suffering that confronts us every day, otherwise we’d quickly go under. Medical jargon helps keep us remote, yet seeing colleagues suffer is hard. If we think too much, we realise that we – and our loved ones – are just as vulnerable as the rest of humanity.”
“Travel is a joy, full of surprises. Perhaps some of the most enjoyable times are those where one comes close to disaster: the risks add spice, and make for great stories when you are safely back home again.”
“Travel experiences are emotionally loaded. Often there is excitement and stimulation. The tingle-factor though comes partly from the fact that we're stressed, just a little.”
“Living in the edge - that's what I feel like when I don't know what my bowels are going to do next.”
“In Nepal, the quality of conversation is much more important than accuracy of the content. Maybe we get overexcited about information in England?”
“The Chinese say that there is no scenery in your home town. They’re right. Being in another place heightens the senses, allows you to see more, enjoy more, take delight in small things; it makes life richer. You feel more alive, less cocooned.”
“A Glimpse of Eternal Snows celebrates Nepali wildlife: a smooth grey boulder lifts its head to become a rhinoceros; a langur look-out hysterically grunts the alarm from the treetop as a tiger merges into the dappled scrub; and a menacing mantis makes her home in the makeshift bathroom and refuses to become a pet.”