Mark Randall M.D.

Mark Randall grew up on a military base in Japan, and later on a mission station in Zimbabwe. He started assisting his father in surgery at the age of fourteen but disliked standing hours in the O.R. for and decided he would never go into medicine. He returned to the U.S. to attend college at Samford University and then University of Alabama Birmingham School of Medicine, completing his general surgery residency at Greenville Memorial Hospital, S.C. After residency he and his wife went to Zimbabwe and he was able to operate in the same O.R. He and his wife backpacked through several countries in Europe.

Later he went into private surgical practice in Alabama and then they worked for fifteen years at several hospitals in Thailand, and East Asia.

A letter to a travel agent complaining of a lack of time in transit at Bangkok due to traveling with two small children, started his writing career, as she said it was the funniest letter she had read and ought to be published.