Contact Wounds: A War Surgeon's Education

by Jonathan Kaplan

Book Overview

Surgery is the crude art of cutting people open, yet it is also a symphony of delicate manipulation and subtle chords. So says Jonathan Kaplan in his stunning book Contact Wounds , an electrifying account of a doctor's education in the classroom, in life, and on the battlefield. Inspired by his father, a military surgeon in World War II and Israel's nascent fight for statehood, Kaplan became a doctor and was appointed to a post at a woefully understaffed...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802142788
• ISBN13: 9780802142788
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A Tragic Sign of our Times

This is the story of an education that few would choose. Dr. Kaplan tells the story of a life spent as a real life MASH surgeon. Not even though in as good a set of conditions as on the film/TV show. He began his life in South Africa at the time the black Africans were beginning to demand rights from the white Government. From there it seems that he went from one hot spot to another. Israel at fourteen, just after the Six-Day War. He says he became a doctor because it took a long time in school and he enjhoyed school. It was after that that his real education began. Instead of allowing himself to be drafted into the apartheid army he began a self-exile from his home country. Since then he has been in one war after another. Surprisingly there are few moments of philosophy or anger at a system that has given him plenty of places to practice his specialty of war sugery. So many that the Royal College of Surgeons in London has set up a course to prepare surgeons for future conflict. This is not a good sign for mankind. As a book, it has its funny moments, it is excellently written. It is only in the overall image that the consumate tragedy comes through. The last sentence in the book: 'But every day I read the war news like job-vacancy ads, looking for peace.'

No Ordinary Life

Jonathan Kaplan has written a book that imerses the reader in a world that could be straight out of a Hollywood script, and should be a Hollywood script. I couldn't put it down. Nobody could ever call this man's life mundane. Growing up in a Country struggling to find itself, then travelling to some of the worlds worst places, all the while helping others in desperate need, and sometimes getting himself into hot water. A "naughty" guy who has a zest for life and adventure. I loved it, a great read.

I couldn't put it down

Kaplan has written a marvellous prequel to his "Dressing Station" - from his childhood to the present day. The book is compelling, and I guzzled it down in a single sitting. It is authentic, humorous, poignant, intelligent, and uncompromising. He manages to flip into history and politics and back again, without losing the thread of his story. As the book progresses, the relevance of everything to everything else becomes evident. A far better book than his aclaimed first book, in my view.

A book for realists, graveyard comedians, and armchair saw-bones

Jonathan Kaplan is a soldier in his own private war. Expatriate by choice from his home in South Africa, he wanders the world looking for other people's wounds to stitch. He has spent time in the battlefields of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Angola and Iraq being primary among them. What does a war surgeon on temporary assignment do? "Acute war surgery is crude but straightforward: stop the bleeding, cut away the lacerated tissue." Seems simple enough, and Kaplan continually stresses that he is no genius, a man who became a doctor, he claims, because med school was a long course and he figured he'd enjoy college life. Much of what has happened in his thrown together life has been the result, to hear him tell it, of serendipity or mischance. But his modesty is an obvious cover-up. The man is brilliant, dedicated and brave. His excellent writing style is icing on the cake. The book takes us through Kaplan's journey as a teenager to an Israel wracked by recent war, his first experience of trying to live sane in a landscape of chaos. Exploring the underground bunkers in the kibbutz below the Golan Heights, the young Kaplan saw medical supplies laid out and understood "the truth at the heart of the practice of medicine: that there was no mystery, that learning and skill turned these ordered bits of equipment into the means of stopping bleeding and bringing together shattered tissue to make a greater order, to save a life." Kaplan got his medical education in South Africa during the apartheid years when dedicated whites practiced their craft in deprived and dreary township clinics under haphazard conditions. His residencies included an aborted stay in the Seychelles, where a casual affair with a girl linked to the dictatorial president "Jimmy" Mancham sent him to ground. Returning to Cape Town he barely squeaked through his finals. Feeling less than confident in his ability to actually practice medicine, he was advised by a friend to "listen a lot, look sympathetic, and nod slowly." From Kaplan's adventures, you get the impression that medical temping may be a final frontier for people who need to live on the edge. Everywhere he goes he finds broken bodies and heart-rending human wreckage. He deals with each case as it comes before him and leaves with some regret to move on to the next crisis. The MASH-side humor glues the tragedies together: the dog that ate the condom, the incident of the piece of finger among the shrimp. Somewhere along the way, without drawing much attention to it, Kaplan became an expert consultant as well as a surgeon. "I worked on an investigative documentary in Japan about the hunting of dolphins on an industrial scale for their meat...then as a doctor in an embattled Burma's Shan State." He spent a relaxing and generally exhilarating time as medical adviser to an English doctor series on the telly. "Doubts that stalked my career progression were forgotten." One of the sadder portions of the memoir con

Fascinating Life

While Kaplan isn't self-aggrandizing in any way, I couldn't help but admire him after I finished this utterly absorbing memoir. It has the same kind of appeal as the movie The Year of Living Dangerously-- only, he's a doctor, not a journalist, and the experiences he has are real. From growing up Jewish in South Africa during apartheid, to living on a militant kibbutz in Israel to being a war surgeon in shockingly primitive conditions in an Angolan field hospital, the stories he tells are gripping. I really couldn't put this one down.