The Dressing Station
A Surgeon's Chronicle of War and Medicine
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- € 10,99
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- € 10,99
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In this “vividly compelling” New York Times Notable Book, a surgeon recounts his experiences in war zones (The Washington Post).
From treating the casualties of apartheid in Cape Town to operating on Kurdish guerrillas in Northern Iraq at the end of the Gulf War, Jonathan Kaplan has saved (and lost) lives in the remotest corners of the world in the most extreme conditions. He has been a hospital surgeon, a ship’s physician, an air-ambulance doctor, and a trauma surgeon. He has worked in locations as diverse as England, Burma, Eritrea, the Amazon, Mozambique, and the United States.
In his “eloquent . . . beautifully written” memoir of unforgettable adventure and tragedy, Dr. Kaplan explores the great challenge of his career—to maintain his humanity in the face of incredible pain and suffering (The New York Times Book Review). “Packed with moments of searing intensity,” The Dressing Station is an “extraordinary” look into the nature of human violence, the shattering contradictions of war, and the complicated role of medicine in the modern world (The Washington Post).
“In this refreshingly unsentimental memoir, [Kaplan] offers a vivid look at what it’s like to practice medicine in places where there are always too many casualties and not enough resources. His descriptions of surgery are unflinching . . . Kaplan gives us a remarkable self-portrait of the war junkie.” —The New Yorker
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."
