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Surgeon Jonathan Kaplan has flown around the world on medical assignments, but as his terrific debut book The Dressing Station 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. Nothing seems to polarise countries more than the demands on its medical practitioners--those that have them. Now working in occupational medicine in London, specialising appropriately in stress, the committal of Kaplan's experiences to paper can make for grisly reading at times, but his resolve and conscience are as undeniable as his expressive, visceral descriptions. While at times bearing out the adage that what's blood and pus to us is bread and butter to doctors, he doesn't shrink from describing his own shocked emotional reactions, for this is not just an exercise in ghost-busting; he admits that he is still "jostled" by looming spectres, and like Fred Huyler's short fiction based on his experiences working in ER, The Blood of Strangers, his unflinching renderings go beyond anecdote to something more fundamental and vital. At the close, in his London surgery, a businessman snaps "what do you know about death?". Rather a lot, as it happens, as this clinical tour de force so stirringly reveals.--David Vincent
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