ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David R Shlim M.D. was born in Portland, Oregon in 1949.  He earned a B.A. in English literature at Pomona College and his M.D. degree from Rush Medical College.  After completing one year of internship and working briefly in family practice and emergency medicine, he travelled to Nepal to volunteer at a high-altitude rescue post near the base of Mt. Everest and returned for two more three-month stints over the next three years.  In 1983, he joined a clinic in Kathmandu that specialized in the care of foreigners in Nepal.  He became the director of the clinic and worked in Nepal for the next fifteen years.

The CIWEC clinic was the first clinic in the world that saw large numbers of travelers at their destination, creating a unique opportunity to study the diseases of travelers.  Research conducted at the clinic helped it become the most famous travel medicine clinic in the world.  Dr. Shlim has published over 55 original papers on travel-medicine topics in peer-reviewed journals and authored more than two dozen chapters in authoritative travel medicine and tropical medicine textbooks.  He’s given hundreds of lectures in venues all over the world.  In 1989, he helped discover a new intestinal protozoal pathogen, Cyclospora, the first to be discovered in seventy-eight years.  In 2013, he was elected president of the International Society of Travel Medicine (ISTM). 

During his time in Nepal, Dr. Shlim served ten years as the Medical Director of the Himalayan Rescue Association and was given an award by the Prime Minister of Nepal for his lifetime contribution to rescue in Nepal.  For 20 years he wrote the “Health and Safety” chapter in Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya, published by Lonely Planet.  He was working in Kathmandu in 1996 when the disaster that was memorialized in the book, Into Thin Air, took place, treating the victims that were evacuated from the mountain.   

Dr. Shlim has received research awards from both the International Society of Travel Medicine and the Wilderness Medical Society (WMS) and was awarded a lifetime achievement award from the WMS.  He was honoured to be inducted as a Fellow of the ISTM in the first year that the honour was created, and he was the first American travel medicine physician to be asked to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons (Glasgow).

In 1984, Dr. Shlim started offering a free weekly clinic at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery near Kathmandu.  This led to a close relationship with the head of the monastery, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche and his father, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche.  His relationship with Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche spans more than thirty-five years, and he served as the personal physician of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche for 11 years, until his death in 1996.  Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche is one of the most popular and influential reincarnate Tibetan lamas in the world, and Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche was widely recognized as one of the greatest meditation teachers of the past century and gave meditation instructions to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.  Dr. Shlim has also had a close connection with Phakchok Rinpoche. Studying with these great Tibetan masters taught him that compassion is a quality that can be trained and thereby greatly enhance both the life and practice of caregivers. 

Dr. Shlim was married to his wife, Jane, in 1990 and they have two children.  In 1998, the family moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where they currently reside.  When he moved back to the U.S., he organized two Medicine and Compassion conferences with Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche and later transcribed and edited the teachings into the book, Medicine and Compassion, which has been continuously in print since 2004, and has sold over 13,000 copies in North America.  A 10th anniversary edition was brought out in 2014.  The book has also been published in six other languages.

Dr. Shlim currently practices travel medicine in Jackson Hole.  He has taught an ongoing weekly course in Tibetan Buddhism for the past twenty years.  He served as the head of the Teton District Board of Health for ten years, and currently serves as the President of Gomde California, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s main retreat center in North America.  He toured with The Rolling Stones for three years as the doctor for the band, traveling with them to Canada, the U.S., Japan, China, and Australia. 

He has served on several working groups for the Centers for Disease Control that help formulate U.S. policy in relation to rabies vaccine, Japanese encephalitis vaccine, tickborne encephalitis vaccine, and yellow fever vaccine.  In 2009, he was asked to become the first outside editor of the CDC’s book, Health Information for International Travel (The Yellow Book) and has remained as an editor to the present day.  The book is the definitive source of travel medicine information for much of the English-speaking world.

Dr. Shlim formed a company in 2020 called Medicine and Compassion LLC to promote his efforts to demonstrate that compassion can be trained.  So far, the company has produced four Medicine and Compassion Retreats, released 52 videos filmed at the retreats, taught a medical school elective at the National University of Ireland, in Galway, and created an online course for the Samye Institute called “Training in Compassion.” 

REVIEWS

“An extraordinary story about finding meaning and purpose. The book is profound and moving, infused with clarity and wisdom about life, death and everything in between.  A brilliant, life-changing read.”

-  Jimmy Chin, Oscar-winning director, adventurer, and photographer

"I loved this book. Dr. Shlim’s story is candid, wise, fascinating, funny, tragic, astonishing, hopeful, and wonderfully entertaining. It reminded me that compassion, if cultivated with purpose, can expand without limit in each of us, enriching not only our own lives, but the lives of everyone we encounter."

- Jon Krakauer

I really believe that the author has written an important and wonderful book—this is not just the story of a young man in foreign parts (although it is that), or the story of his own, gradual enlightenment (although it is that too), but it is the story of how seemingly accidental the most important steps in our lives can seem.  What is transcendent and original about this work in a sometimes tired and overcrowded memoir field is that the author somehow magically makes himself less important and the journey more important as we go along.  How rare and lovely.  I also think the writing and anecdotes are wonderfully done – he manages glimpses of humor and self-awareness, even as the reader is drawn along by the sheer edge-of-the-seat, life-and-death material.  The work is tight, boiled down to a narrative that’s focused on this lovely, slow-opening of a realization – the work shifting from the adrenaline of trauma of medicine to the need for compassion in it. 

Alexandra Fuller is the author of the New York Times Best Selling memoirs, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, and Leaving Before the Rains Come, among several other books.  Fuller has written for The New Yorker, Vogue, and is a frequent contributor to National Geographic Magazine.

David Shlim has had a remarkable life, both in service of those in need in remote parts of the world and of spiritual discovery in the presence of some of the greatest Tibetan masters of our times. In Nepal, for over fifteen years, he was the physician of reference for visiting travelers and was also often called to look after the health of monastics, lamas and teachers. Uniting his medical vocation with the essence of Buddhism — altruism and compassion — he published a remarkable book, Medicine and Compassion — which led to his teaching physicians around the world on how to bring back compassion at the heart of their profession and day to day activities. His lively and insightful memoirs are a delight to read.  

Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk, scientist, philanthropist, and translator, and the author of twenty books on Tibetan Buddhist topics. 

This is one of those rare books that makes you a captive from the first sentence.  In episodes, we learn about the life of a medical doctor whose career initially looked in no way promising, but who surprisingly became one of the first rescue doctors in the Himalayas and subsequently a world-renowned researcher who discovered a new organism causing a particularly serious form of diarrhea.  Breathtaking are the accounts of the initial rescue missions at high altitude when the author lacked both equipment and experience.  With a superb style, he describes his step-by-step learning process with honesty and modesty. The exceptional aspect of this life story, however, is founded on Dr. Shlim’s close contacts with Tibetan lamas and meditation teachers.  The gripping chapters describe how Buddhist practice transformed the way he approached patients. “I started to convey a more compassionate attitude that allowed them to open up, to relax, to ask questions, to feel cared for, and to cry if necessary”, he states.  Alas, this approach to patient care is quite different to the approach used by many M.D.s in industrialized nations.  The author then shares his efforts to extend this type of compassion to a broader humanity.  In one of the final chapters the author describes how he suddenly experienced a dramatic, life-threatening situation and how meditation saved him — somehow miraculously for those not acquainted, but very impressive and instructive.  Although the emotional roots of David Shlim are in the mountains of Asia, among his friends and colleagues he became known as the Socrates of travel medicine.  His fascinating memoirs are touching — highly recommended for anyone with an open mind.

Professor Robert Steffen lives in Zurich, Switzerland, and is the author of hundreds of journal articles, and book chapters on travel medicine.  He is widely accepted as the most important figure in the development of travel medicine