The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Chronicle of War and Medicine
By Jonathan Kaplan
Publishers Group West, 2002

(From the publisher) From treating the casualties of apartheid in Cape Town to operating on Kurdish guerrillas in Northern Iraq at the end of the Gulf War, Dr. Jonathan Kaplan has saved (and lost) lives in the remotest corners of the world under the most extreme conditions.

Now he delivers The Dressing Station, a brilliant and often harrowing narrative that reveals the crucial work of field doctors all over the world, and the devastating realities of the zones of conflict in which they operate. Dr. Jonathan Kaplan 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. He has operated on wounded straight off the battlefield, treated obscure tropical disease, and helped victims of corporate stress and industrial poisoning.

Whether running medical research programs in high-tech laboratories or caring for children wasted by famine and war, he has seen his skills used and sometimes abused. A pivotal lesson early in his career was the experience of a friend and medical colleague who had been required to save the life of a prisoner so that he could be subjected to torture. It anticipated the doctor's greatest challenge—to maintain his humanity even when that option does not seem possible.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan's life in medicine has been one of unforgettable adventure and tragedy. The Dressing Station provides a haunting insight into the nature of human violence, the shattering contradictions of war, and the complicated role of medicine in the modern world.

Kaplan describes what it's like to face pain and death on a regular basis and plunges the reader into the frenetic world of the operating theatre. The dark humour required to cope in stressful situations infuses the book with the force and clarity of Kaplan's prose providing an unforgettable portrait of modern, global medicine.