A doctor who fought to save Princess Diana’s life after her catastrophic car crash has spoken about how he tried “everything possible” to get her heart beating again.
MonSef Dahman was a young duty general surgeon at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris when he was called to the accident and emergency department to treat a “young woman” in the early hours of 31 August 1997.
“I was resting in the duty room when I got a call from Bruno Riou, the senior duty anaesthetist, telling me to go to the emergency room,” Dr Dahman, 56, told the Daily Mail.
“I wasn’t told it was Lady Diana, but [only] that there’d been a serious accident involving a young woman.
“The organisation of the Pitie-Salpetriere hospital was very hierarchical. So when you got a call from [such] a high-level colleague, that meant the case was particularly serious.”
Dr Dahman, who was 33 at the time, said he realised the true seriousness of things when he arrived at A&E moments later.
Prof Riou was in the room and personally taking care of the woman on the stretcher, which was a “sign of the special importance”, Dr Dahman said.
He was then informed that the woman was Diana, Princess of Wales.
“It only took that moment for all this unusual activity to become clear to me,” he recalled.
“For any doctor, any surgeon, it is of very great importance to be faced with such a young woman who is in this condition. But of course even more so if she is a princess.”
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