Jonathan Kaplan, travelling surgeon, journalist, film-maker — and now author of The Dressing Station (Picador) — is disarmingly uncertain as to whether he has done anything useful with his life. And meeting him is quite a surprise. He is slight, younger looking than his 47 years, has a lot of floppy dark hair and doesn’t look like someone who’d cope with battlefield surgery or similar crises. I’d gone to the interview thinking, “This guy is just too cool to be true.” Prepared to be unimpressed, I was won over by his simplicity and his seriousness.
The Dressing Station is fascinating yet disturbing reading. Fascinating because Kaplan has a real gift for describing medical detail in a clear and comprehensible way — enlightening for those of us unlikely ever to wield a scalpel — and disturbing because it ruffles that complacent ignorance in which we continue our lives while there is so much suffering, bloodletting and conflict on the planet. And as to why anyone would go off to where it’s all happening if they didn’t have to — well, the answer is not really provided in this book. Kaplan is as reticent about his own personal life as he is discreet about the privacy of his patients.
He begins his book thus: “I grew up with the expectation that I would serve.” Yet he gives the impression that he feels he has led a privileged and indulgent life, in the sense that he has been able to use medicine as a way to see the world. He has even, he says, made choices out of whim or to escape a personal situation. Friends and colleagues are now ensconced in the medical hierarchies of Western medicine; he says they are “financially secure to a staggering degree”, and have “chosen wisely”. He denies emphatically that he means this ironically — “These are friends of mine” — but adds that he has better dinner-party stories.
And so he should have. After training at the University of Cape Town, in London and in New York, his work in the past 10 years has taken him to Kurdistan (in the early Nineties), Mozambique refugee camps, and last year, Eritrea, among others. As a film-maker he has investigated mercury pollution in Brazil and South Africa. At times he has worked as a ship’s doctor and an aeromedical physician.
To all of this he has brought not only his knowledge and skill, but also considerable thoughtfulness. His training in London, he recalls in the book at it nears an end, “had been a constant process of eroding certainties. First to go had been security: life was tremblingly insecure; death, easy and close.”
Love and repose had also, at that stage, eluded him Asked whether he had ever regained these, he says, “I think I have gained a certain equanimity through accumulated experience. I’ll try and do the best I can in situations, [but] the broader view is that I won’t always be successful and that I cannot excoriate myself for the places where I have failed.”
He also shows the reader the inside of situations we see glossed over on TV news. His take on aid organisations and interventionists such as Médécins sans Frontières is lucid and disillusioning. In Mozambique, for example, he speaks of a “plague of altruism” in which the main beneficiaries are often the aid organisations rather than the refugees and deslocados.
And he’s aware that he himself is part of the questionable intervention when he goes into these situations. He confesses that he enjoys the “exhilaration, the free-fall rush into unpredictability”, and that he would find it difficult to go back into the routine of ordinary hospital work.
The book was originally commissioned by a publisher who knew Kaplan had done some writing and journalism, and had heard some of his stories from a third party. Writing the book was quite gruelling in parts — he had to go back to journals he had kept while out in the field. He had written them purely for himself, “as a means of recording intense experiences and as a way of encapsulating all the frustrations, anger, often fear, that I felt,” forcing him to re-live things “that I hadn’t any memory of experiencing and had quite clearly suppressed.”
At the very end of the interview, he produced the journal that he’d kept while in Eritrea: a modest A5, but closely written and interspersed with watercolour sketches and other memorabilia, in itself an extraordinary artefact. This daily record-keeping has surely contributed to the elegance of the writing and sense of reality in this examination of suffering and how we deal with it on the broader battlefield of life.
He concludes his account with a chapter on occupational health in which he makes it clear that not even the wealthy and corporately powerful are exempt.