The Dressing Station
A Surgeon's Odyssey
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Alan Paton Award and the South African Booksellers Choice Award
Jonathan Kaplan has been a hospital surgeon, a flying doctor, a ship's medical officer and a battlefield surgeon. He has worked in places as diverse as Burma, Kurdistan, America, Mozambique, England and Eritrea. The Dressing Station presents a vivid, moving account of the varied faces of medicine he has encountered. In a mixture of reportage, confession and exposition Kaplan talks about the practice of medicine and of its shortcomings, because medicine is not always benign or balanced. At its extremes it is a process of treating the casualties, for life is a war, and being a doctor is serving in that war.
'His account is born of two talents: to save lives and to bear witness. The result is a unique mixture of biography and reportage, both personal and clinical' Time Magazine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Surgeon-cum-journalist and documentary filmmaker Kaplan travels to the edges of the world and back in this confident, gripping debut, a field doctor's tale of life and death on the front lines. Journeying to the Middle East with an offshoot of M decins sans Fronti res (and in the process having much of his medical equipment mistakenly tossed from the back of a Marine helicopter into the mountains in northern Iraq), the South African native confronts the atrocities of the ongoing Turkish-Iraqi Kurdish conflict. Operating on floors, administering medicines by penlight, he saves a handful of refugees and loses many more, casualties "largely the victims of preventable suffering, inflicted by the policies and actions of their fellow humans." As a cruise ship doctor in the South China Sea, Kaplan treats crazed alcoholics and sets bones broken in brawls; later, he becomes a "flying doctor," traveling wherever in the world his surgical expertise is urgently needed. Eventually, he researches occupational contamination in South Africa and Brazil. From Namibia to Mozambique, Burma to Eritrea, Kaplan is an eloquent, observant narrator. And at the heart of these beautifully written adventures, a rich human drama unfolds as Kaplan makes superhuman efforts to uphold the Hippocratic oath: "I might have hoped that it would be possible to take a holiday from war even to have lost interest in it entirely but war, as Lenin had warned, remained interested in me."
