South African doctors have a very good reputation. The excellence of their medical training is matched by the breadth of their clinical experience. For example, a young South African doctor in surgical training in Britain often has more practical experience of bullet wounds than the boss who is teaching him; or such, at any rate, would have been the case until quite recently, when inner-city surgeons started to treat the victims of drug and gang wars.
Jonathan Kaplan is a South African surgeon who has eschewed the conventional career that was clearly within his reach for that of a volunteer surgeon to the war zones of the world. He puts his life in danger to save the injured and maimed, who are often very poor into the bargain (the poor are easier to hit than the rich). His first memoir, The Dressing Station, was a brilliant evocation of his wandering life; his second book, Contact Wounds, is less good but still enthralling and mostly well written. Somewhat loosely constructed, it leaves the author an enigma to me, and perhaps to himself.
He is the grandson of a Lithuanian Jewish migrant to South Africa (the story of Lithuanian Jewish migration to the southern tip of the African continent is an astonishing one). His father was an orthopaedic surgeon who served in the second world war and also in the Israeli war of independence, before being appointed to a chair of orthopaedic surgery in New York. One might almost say, therefore, that war surgery is in the author’s blood.
His first brush with adventure was in Israel. He was sent by his father to a kibbutz at the age of 14. He learnt to bear arms while patrolling the perimeter of the kibbutz to protect it from attack; and it was in Israel that he revealed himself to be someone who preferred his independence of judgment to the comfort of belonging to a group.
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