'The Great Physician' is one of Jesus' well-known titles. But what would he really have been like as a doctor, facing the pressures of medical life?

David Stevens is executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, USA. He spent many years as a missionary doctor at Tenwek hospital, Kenya. In Jesus, MD, he looks at the particular problems of mission medicine and reflects on how Jesus might have dealt with them.

The blow from a machete had caught him across the bridge of his nose and sliced all the way across and through his face, down to the bottom of his jaw. His face had been literally cut in two, with the lower half peeled forward and lying on his chest..... For some reason American medical texts don't contain much about machete wounds of the face.

This is just one of the challenging situations Stevens encountered as a missionary doctor - along with doubling up as the anaesthetist and orthopaedic surgeon simultaneously, or managing patients with malaria, prostate cancer, meningitis and meningomyeloceles all in the same day! Then there were the regular power cuts and never-ending queues in the outpatients' department.

In each of these he asks how Jesus would have responded. All of the examples are applicable to Western doctors and focus on Jesus' response to stressful situations, such as the need to spend time learning from God, the power of touch and compassion, or our responsibility to live lives of sacrifice for others. He shows how it is vital to be aware of what God is doing in patients' spiritual lives and how we can share Christ with them; as Christians in the medical field we have more to offer our patients than just healthcare.

At times the analogy of Christian discipleship and medicine is a bit stretched, and some of the American terminology may be alien, but Jesus, MD is a book that medical students can easily identify with - be it the grillings Stevens himself had as a student by his consultant or issues we face as Christians such as trusting God to provide for our needs.

It is a great book to open your eyes to what being a missionary doctor is like and how we can serve God practically in a medical setting. Stevens sums up by saying, 'a call is nothing more or less than seeing a need and realising that God has specially equipped you to meet that need.' That's something we all need to hear.

Reviewed by Kathy Li, a clinical student at Imperial College School of Medicine, London