Bara Knife & Gun Club: Misadventures in the world's most notorious trauma hospital

A journey through the front lines of trauma, error and grief at the world’s most infamous hospital

Every young doctor hears the stories about Bara: the infamous hospital in Johannesburg where you patch up gunshot wounds and practise ‘real medicine’. When Nicholas George Chapman first arrived as a wide-eyed medical student, he immediately found himself in too deep – elbow-deep, in fact, in someone’s chest cavity, a place as exhilarating as it was terrifying.

Years later, he returned to join an eclectic band of volunteer doctors. It was everything he'd wanted: stab wounds, shortages and feats of ingenious improvisation; long shifts held together by gallows humour and the camaraderie of the club.

But it wasn’t long until the ‘real medicine’ that Nick once idolised started to look different. When the stakes are so high, mistakes can be deadly, and after a near miss almost left a woman dead, Nick came to realise that the saving grace of the modern medical system is not one doctor’s virtuoso performance but the system itself: the protocols, the paperwork, the checks and the balances.

With dark humour and hard-won honesty, The Bara Knife & Gun Club explores the peculiar love affair between the volunteer doctors and the hospital that needs them as much as they need it, and what it is that makes a doctor good – not the science of medicine, but the art.