Jonathan Kaplan: The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Chronicle Of War And Medicine

In one of The Dressing Station's many frank and illuminating anecdotes, Jonathan Kaplan tells of a medical student whose clinical exam involved checking a patient's testicles. After handling them and finding nothing wrong, he placed the end of a stethoscope on the scrotum and listened intently. Asked what he heard, the student replied, "Oh, normal scrotal sounds," and passed the exam. The moral of the story is that a surgeon never expresses self-doubt, but he often feels it. Kaplan himself confesses to this dirty secret time and again throughout The Dressing Station, his impassioned personal history, in spite of the obvious evidence that he's a highly skilled and capable physician. As he travels from his home in Cape Town, South Africa, to the war-torn hellholes of Kurdistan, Burma, and Mozambique, Kaplan learns foremost to come to terms with his limitations in the face of greed, bureaucracy, neglect, mass suffering, and preventable death. Equal parts travelogue, autobiography, scathing indictment of the medical establishment, and inspired plea for doctors to embrace the Hippocratic Oath and take their craft where it's most needed, The Dressing Station leavens its complexity with direct, plainspoken language and reserves of compassion. The book opens with a formative event in apartheid-era Cape Town, when Kaplan, a privileged medical-school student, participated in a rally that turned violent. Boarded up with dozens of victims in a church, Kaplan got his first taste of urgent care on a large scale, and was taken by a heady rush of immediacy and unpredictability that's rare in ordinary hospital rounds. After graduating and obtaining his master's degree in England, Kaplan took a research stint in America, where his fruitful experiments with balloon angioplasty were buried after the sponsoring company determined there was no profit in it. Disillusioned by the mercenary nature of commercial healthcare, Kaplan began visiting war zones, globe-hopping from Africa to Southeast Asia and back again to treat waves of casualties, often with limited supplies and personnel. His stories are harrowing and laced with righteous anger, both over the unnecessary suffering of helpless innocents around the world, and over the doctors, leaders, militaries, and bureaucracies that fail to avert preventable afflictions and death. When he reemerges in first-world society, manning a cruise ship on the South China Sea, Kaplan can barely disguise his contempt for passengers who take their fortunes for granted and never consider the cruel realities that exist beyond their guided tours. At times, The Dressing Station skirts a self-righteous and didactic tone, but Kaplan presents his front-line experiences so vividly that his moral disgust seems restrained under the circumstances. As a doctor, he understands his responsibilities to society at large, and simply wonders why so many others fail to act accordingly.