The Dressing Station: A Surgeons Odyssey - What for Chop Today?

Jonathan Kaplan Picador, 2001, £15.99 and available in paperback from 11th October 2002 at £6.99, pp 256 ISBN 0 330 48080 4 Rating: ****	Gail Haddock Travellerseye, 2000, £7.99, pp 337 ISBN 1 903 07007 4 Rating: ****

Isnt it strange that even though we all go through the same medical school factory we all end up doing different things? Some of us, however, want to be more “different” than others and feel stifled at the thought of settling down to a “normal” job. The authors of these two books fall into that category.

Jonathan Kaplan seems to thrive on working outside the mainstream. He went to medical school in South Africa before training as a surgeon in Britain and going to America to teach and to do research. After he had had a research innovation “pinched,” and realising that most American students went into medicine as a business decision, he decided that this was not for him. So, despite the lack of security and pensions, he launched himself into an oddball collection of jobs ranging from ships doctor and medic for a travel insurance company to being a surgeon in various dangerous locations, including Kurdistan, Eritrea, and Burma. But he did not stop there. He has made film documentaries and investigated occupational health disasters, such as mercury poisoning in miners in South Africa. Each of these chapters in his life are described in graphic detail, which may not be for the faint hearted. But it is not all blood and gore. There are moving accounts of people struggling to survive against the odds.

What I found strange was that he seemed to be able to leave one job behind and launch himself straight into another one seemingly emotionally unscathed. How can you go from treating people being blown to pieces in a civil war to treating the rich cruising on a ship? There is little insight into what drives him. Only at the end of the book does he admit that he feels at home among the most vulnerable and helpless people. He can then work as an occupational health physician with rich bankers in London, however, by analysing that they too are victims: victims of the relentless drive to succeed that was tearing them apart.

You know exactly where you are with Gail Haddock. Her account of working as a doctor in Sierra Leone is engagingly refreshing as she wears her heart on her sleeve. She is upfront from the start that her motives are not entirely selfless. She wants to stand out from the others when she gets back home, find a man, and lose some weight. She certainly fulfilled the first one but, sadly, not the others. “What for chop today?” means “what do you want to eat today?” Unfortunately for Gail, the only option was plasses: rice swimming in palm oil.

Having trained as a general practitioner, she found herself performing caesarean sections, amputations, and even bowel surgery. She is open about her lack of confidence in surgery and how her poor surgical skills were the reason she chickened out of her first Voluntary Service Overseas posting. Happily, she quickly grows in confidence—well, there was no one else to do it, which usually does wonders for your learning curve—to become renowned for her surgical skills over the course of her traumatic stay: traumatic in that she accidentally found herself being caught up in a civil war.

Gail is easy to click with. She is normal. She makes mistakes, she gets scared stiff, she opens her mouth before engaging her brain, and sometimes, entirely through her own fault, ends up in embarrassing situations. She makes an easy role model because you are left in awe at what she manages to achieve while being so, well, human.

I found both of these books inspirational, but be warned. Reading them might give you itchy feet.