The real reason I went to the Poets & Writers site: Andrea Crawford's "For Writers, the Doctor's Definitely In." Excellent piece on "The literary lineage of those who pursue medicine and also write..." Crawford makes the point that doctors write ALL the time:
Physicians actually write
all the time too; as Bazell ["who
left a PhD program in literature to study psychiatry and whose first book, a
crime novel, is forthcoming from Little, Brown this month"] noted, on a page-by-page basis, he produces more on
a day he practices medicine than on a day he writes fiction. The case history,
or progress note, is the basic unit of medical practice; it's something doctors
work on constantly, and students learn from the first year to see a patient,
hear her story, distill it into a chief complaint or main narrative, and write
it down. It's not unlike the process of writing fiction, Lam ["an emergency physician
whose story collection, Bloodletting
and Miraculous Cures (Weinstein, 2007), was the first debut work to
win Canada's Giller Prize"] says: "The art of
figuring out the medical narrative is, on one hand, to be very intuitive,
instinctual, open, and expansive, and, on the other hand, to be very
reductionist."
"Tell me," doctors say. What great material comes their way and what a terrific way to practice the art of story-telling. All of which gives the opening to point you toward my essay, Feeling Numb, that appeared in Ars Medica.
