The Dressing Station

Surgeon Jonathan Kaplan has flown around the world on medical assignments, but as his debut book suggests, he never feels more engaged with life than when among the dying. Born in South Africa with medicine in his blood, Kaplan trained firstly in Cape Town before moving to London. Frustrated by spending cutbacks, he fled for America, where he saw for the first time medicine as a booming economic force, and recalls a surgeon sobbing over a patient mid-operation on hearing of a Wall Street Crash. Figuring this was not the life for him, in Zululand and Kurdistan, with a medical intervention group, he watches parasitic worms emerge from a prone child's nostril, feels for the first time someone physically die under his hand and unsurprisingly develops his own symptoms of fever and interminable nightmares. A stint on a cruise ship introduces alcoholic psychosis in passengers reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh's "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold", as well as every kind of sexual disease courtesy of South East Asia's fleshpots. Further trips follow, to Mozambique with a film crew, to Burma and to war-ravaged Eritrea, sewing people together whose lives and countries are being ripped apart. "The Dress