WELCOME
Welcome to the website of Jungle Surgeon, the now published memoir of Dr. Lawrence Mueller, available on Amazon. While maintaining a successful full-time surgical practice in the States, from 1992 – 2015, he spent up to a month annually on the northern Thai-Burmese border caring for indigent Burmese refugees by performing hundreds of major operations in remote settings, while helping to establish desperately needed clinics and train medics. An unreported massive ethnic-cleansing campaign by the ruling Burmese military junta directed against the rural minority hill tribes since the 1960s resulted in over a million refugees without access to healthcare and only a scant presence of international aid groups. In Jungle Surgeon, Dr. Mueller shares with his readers many of his self-initiated and highly successful projects, along with the special people and magnificent surroundings encountered in the mountainous border jungles.
This website serves as both an introduction to Jungle Surgeon and a companion to the text itself by bringing these adventures to life for the reader through many colorful photos of people, places and events related in the book. By reading about and then seeing his patients as the real people that they were in their world, hopefully readers can share in the wonder, joy and satisfaction experienced by Dr. Mueller as he ministered to them.
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MEET DR. MUELLER
Lawrence P. Mueller, M.D., F.A.C.S., was raised in a northwest suburb of Chicago and graduated from the University of Notre Dame and Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine.
He enlisted in the U.S. Army and, while on active duty, completed residencies in General and Cardiothoracic Surgery, achieving Diplomate status from both specialty boards. He served a two-year tour as a US Army general, thoracic and vascular surgeon attached to the 121st EVAC Hospital in Seoul, Korea. After ten years on active duty and achieving the Lt. Colonel rank, he was honorably…
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ABOUT THE BOOK
HISTORIC BACKGROUND:
Burma had been a successful British Colony since the 1800’s and was once the world’s largest exporter of rice, but its internal economy collapsed after the Japanese conquest in early WWII. Soon after the Japanese defeat, the United Kingdom granted independence to Burma. Unfortunately, Burma’s government remained unstable and was plagued by successive insurgencies that culminated in a totalitarian military junta coup that then ruled from 1962 to 2011.
The junta, led by General Ne Win, promptly instituted a barbaric ethnic cleansing campaign with the goal of enslaving or annihilating the minority hill tribes, numbering millions, who had inhabited the rural mountainous Burmese jungles for centuries. Once the hill tribes were gone, exploitation of their homelands could proceed unimpeded, including clear-cutting of the last remaining… READ MORE ABOUT THE BOOK