Tales from the operating theatre

Contact Wounds: A War Surgeon’s Education, by Jonathan Kaplan, Picador, €26.25.

Contact Wounds: A War Surgeon’s Education, by Jonathan Kaplan, Picador, €26.25.

Jonathan Kaplan, investigative reporter, documentary film-maker and writer, may seem a little like Moliere’s Medecin Malgre Lui, a doctor in spite of himself.

There is something of the soldier of fortune about this man, whose career has seen him sniffing out trouble in some of the world’s most dangerous places.

But unlike Moliere’s sham doctor, and despite the many other strings to ...