Improbable Journeys

"Live with no excuses and travel with no regrets." —Oscar Wilde

Improbable Journeys is the remarkable story of a life lived in keeping with Wilde’s precept—the life of physician and teacher Bernard Binns. As Binns’ friend Tony Brown said after reading this memoir: “You have led a fantastically interesting life, with a geographical journey like no other—from the Falklands and Kerala, to Srinagar and Kashgar, Suez and Gibraltar, Worksop, London and Oxford, Nigeria and Uganda, Winnipeg and the Arctic, San Francisco and Vancouver Island, and finally to your beloved Whakatane in New Zealand. You present your story as an education in itself. So many of your descriptions, perhaps in particular of ways of life in Canada, are so interesting to read, always with the knowledge that this is a real story.”

Born in the Falkland Islands during his father’s posting there with the Colonial Service, Binns would move with his family on subsequent postings first to India and then to Chinese Turkestan, the latter reached only after an arduous trek through the Himalayas. After the Second World War, he returned to Britain, enrolling in medical school at the University of London after completing high school. Later, Binns specialized in obstetrics and gynaecology at Oxford. Upon completing his training he worked in Uganda, just as Idi Amin was rising to power. Following a stint back in England he moved to Winnipeg with his wife Elaine (also a physician) and children, where he practiced obstetrics and gynaecology. Displeased with changes in medical administration, he returned to university in San Francisco, qualifying in infectious diseases just as the AIDS epidemic hit. His later career included a decade teaching at the University of Manitoba and trips to the Canadian Arctic, where he learned firsthand of the medical and social challenges facing the Inuit.

Improbable Journeys—part travelogue, part medical memoir—paints a remarkable portrait of people and places as well as answering the timeless question of what makes for a successful healer.