Whitcombe and Tombs, 1970. Reasonable second-hand condition.

The human achievements from which we can learn the most are not always the most dramatic. Gordon McShean’s story is an excellent example. It is in fact the story of a man who might proudly boast of the normality of his life.

He was a fairly ordinary Scottish teenager, keen on hitch-hiking and cycling, when he first suffered the symptoms of heart disease. Doctors warned him he must undergo major surgery – then still fairly uncommon – by the age of thirty.

Characteristically undespairing, he continued to live life to the full, working and travelling all over the world. At age twenty-nine, he learned of the advances in heart-repair medicine which might help him, and that operations were being conducted with great success in New Zealand.

So to New Zealand he went, and there received a new lease of life in the shape of a valve transplant from the Green Lane Hospital heart surgery team in Auckland headed by B. G. Barratt-Boyes.

Operation New Zealand is at once a celebration of McShean’s sturdy, commonsensical resilience in the face of a crushing situation, and of the excellence of modern heart surgery and the capable, sympathetic doctors and nurses who administer it. There are no heroics, no medals or decorations, but there is indeed an important lesson to be learned.