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Rowley Richards served as an army doctor during World War II. He worked on the Thai-Burma Railway, was imprisoned in Singapore and spent the final year of the war in a labour camp at Sakata in north-west Japan. During the earlier part of the war Richards kept a diary. Before leaving Singapore he summarised its contents and buried the document with the corpse of a newly-deceased patient. The document was retrieved three years later and its record forms the basis of Richards's autobiography, A Doctor's War (2005).
