In the final days of World War I and the Ottoman Empire, an unnamed fifteen-year-old boy, suffering from severe bone tuberculosis, drifts from doctor to doctor, unwilling to follow their advice. As his despair and incurable condition trap him in a lonely, fevered solitude, he seeks solace in a platonic infatuation with an older girl, Nuzhet. Surgical Ward 9 is one of the most raw and honest accounts ever written of a sick person's inner world -his envy, longing, ambition, disappointment, terror, hope, and despair, all caused by his illness and frailty. This melancholic yet strangely vibrant fictional diary bears traces of Peyami Safa's own childhood struggles, and its power still endures today.