Exceptional Healing

All doctors receive training, but there's no medical school in the world that can teach you how to operate in a hail of shrapnel, or how to amputate a dying boy's leg with a Swiss Army knife. Leena Kaartinen has learned these skills — the hard way. "You can't possibly train for this," says Kaartinen, who for the past nine years has been living in a mud house and working among the isolated Hazara tribal villages in the mountainous Lal-wa-Sarejangal district of central Afghanistan. "You have to improvise. I just pray for wisdom and I get it."

Kaartinen's...