Jonathan Kaplan: The Dressing Station: A surgeon's odyssey

By MARGIE THOMSON

"The practice of medicine," writes Kaplan, "is a series of frontlines." While this is undoubtedly true even metaphorically, in his case it also has a literal meaning.

After 10 years' clinical and research experience in the relative comfort of Britain and the United States, he left the security of hospital surgery to serve in some of the most difficult and dangerous environments in the world: Eritrea, South Africa, Namibia, Kurdistan, Mozambique, Burma.

The stories from his experiences are legion and always fascinating. It is, as the blurb says, "a medical odyssey", in the company of a man who, for all the ghastly scenes of pain, injury and social dislocation he has seen in war zones, can yet understand the traumas inherent in our own societies where material well-being does not always mitigate physical, emotional and psychic damage.

Picador

$34.95