Contact wounds

the long version

A memoir of a doctor's education in the classroom and on the battlefield. Surgery is the art of cutting people open, yet it is also a symphony of delicate manipulation and subtle chords. No other field of medicine carries so much individual responsibility as that of a surgeon. Growing up in South Africa, Kaplan made his own pilgrimage to a kibbutz in Israel at fifteen, coming of age in a land facing stark moral choices in the wake of the Six-Day War. He eventually landed in Angola, taking charge of a combat-zone hospital, the only surgeon for 160,000 civilians, where he was exposed daily to the horrors of war. He portrays serving as a volunteer surgeon in Baghdad--where he treated civilian casualties amid gunfights for control of hospitals and dealt with gangs of looters stripping pharmacies and militant groups harassing doctors out of operating rooms.--From publisher description.