Jonathan Kaplan (medical doctor)

Jonathan Kaplan (* 1956 in South Africa ) is a South African doctor and writer.

Kaplan comes from a medical family, his father is a surgeon, his mother a pathologist. He left South Africa in the mid-1970s because of the ruling apartheid regime and trained as a doctor in Great Britain. He later worked in the USA.

In 1991, during the Second Gulf War, he accepted an offer to help as a surgeon in the Kurdish Autonomous Region in Northern Iraq. After returning to London, he decided not to return to a regulated medical profession and continued to work as a doctor for various aid organizations in crisis areas, including Angola , Mozambique , Burma and Eritrea .

In 2001 he wrote his first book, The Dressing Station, about his experience as a doctor in war zones . It was awarded the prestigious South African Alan Paton Award for literature .

Works

• The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Odyssey . Picador, 2001 (German: Notversorgung . Scherz, 2003. ISBN 978-3502150718 )
• Contact Wounds: A War Surgeon's Education . Picador, 2004

Web links

• Why war is my medicine , interview in the Sunday Times (English)
• Literature by and about Jonathan Kaplan in the catalog of the German National Library