If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to
live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
― Isaac Asimov
Two (and Too) All-consuming Professions
An argument can be made
that writing and medicine have
been linked since antiquity:
Apollo, son of Zeus and Leto,
was recognized in classical
Greek mythology as the god
of both poetry and medicine
(along with music, art, oracles,
archery, plague, sun, light and
knowledge). But it would seem
that medicine and writing—two
professions that demand immense dedication, skill, time,
and mental resources—would
not be natural bedmates.
In a Lancet article on the
topic of literature and medicine,
Faith McLellan, PhD, (then
from the University of Texas
Medical Branch, Galveston, TX,
and now at the World Health
Organization) wrote that the
“most compelling link between
the dual professions of the
physician-writer is the construction of narrative.”1 Both arts
require their experts to be curious about the lives of others,
and to engage intimately with
them while still maintaining a
certain detachment.
Storytelling is key in medicine: listening to a patient’s story, interpreting it, and retelling
it at rounds. “When physicians
Siddhartha Mukherjee
34
CardioSource WorldNews
become writers, whatever their
subject, they are in a sense
only transferring their storytelling from one arena to another”
wrote Dr. McClellan.
Doug Zipes, MD, thinks that
physicians who write are somehow “DNA wired with a desire/
need/or gift for creativity.” In an
interview with CardioSource
WorldNews, he explained that,
for him, fiction writing offered a
different and “exciting” challenge after many decades of
practicing medicine and prolific
academic writing.
“It’s a challenge to be in a
new area and totally unknown,
where they say, ‘Zipes who?’”
he said. “At this point, (fiction)
is the most exciting writing that
I do, although I still have four
textbooks and I’m the editorin-chief of two heart journals,
but it’s just so fun to sit down
and write fiction.” Less fun,
however, is the need t o market
his writing on social media and
elsewhere, which with about 1
million titles being published
every year in the U.S. alone, is
absolutely necessary for a relatively unknown fiction writer.
Yet, despite his almost 50
years of experience writing science, Dr. Zipes found that writing a novel requires a totally
different skill set. In preparation, he spent a few summers
at the Iowa Summer Writing
Festival to learn how to “create
my own worlds and create my
own characters.”
For his part, after 3 decades of practicing cardiology
Sherwin Nuland
Michael Palmer
and conducting research Eric
Topol, MD, felt compelled to
write his books and bring a
greater awareness to the huge
changes coming to medicine.
“I had never thought I would or
could write a book for the public, but I felt that the changes
in store for medicine were
particularly important, in some
ways enthralling and in other
ways daunting and they were
largely being ignored.”
For Valentin Fuster, MD,
PhD, writing El Círculo de la
Motivación, described as an
intimate personal account of
his life, was motivated by his
desire to help people transform
their own lives. As the book’s
summary attests (translated):
“In order to demonstrate
that motivation is the engine of
life, cardiologist and scientist
Valentin Fuster has decided
to write a book that flees easy
council, and has chosen to
share very intimate experiences with the reader that may
be useful to society. It is not a
self-help book. Nor a declaration of intent to build an ideal
world. They are the reflections
and advice of a doctor, a scientist and observer of life for over
70 years. It is a defense to the
need to replace pessimism and
negativism with optimism and
positivism.”
Dr. Fuster is currently working on a book on aging.
Reference:
1. McLellan MF. Lancet
1997;349:564-67.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
the book and it fully deserved to be the #1 book (nonfiction) in the world. I feel it immortalized Paul.”
Just down the list from Dr. Kalanithi’s book at
#4 on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction
bestseller list (as of May 15, 2016), is Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal (2014), at #11, which considers
“the modern experience of mortality” and how
medicine is failing the test of assisting patients to
a good death. Alongside his success as a surgeon,
Dr. Gawande has received international renown for
his insightful, honest, and sometimes highly critical looks at the practice of modern medicine. He
has written four books and dozens of articles that
reveal and evaluate the practice of medicine today.
And, of course, there is the late Oliver Sacks,
the poet laureate of contemporary medicine. Dr.
Sacks wrote in 1984 about his experience recovering from muscle surgery and then, in 2006, about
the loss of stereoscopic vision after radiation
therapy for uveal melanoma. Then, in Dec 2014, in
a New York Times op-ed piece, he shared the news
that he was dying from metastatic cancer. When he
died in August 2015, Dr. Sacks was and is remembered not just as a gifted neurologist, but as one
who was able to chronicle death and illness from
the cool intellectual perspective of a physician and
scientist, yet with profound sympathy. In his own
words, he “bore witness” to the wealth of emotion
felt by the sick and dying.
Dr. Sacks’ valedictory essay was not about death
but about what makes life most worth living and
what is meant by a “good and worthwhile life.” It is an
impactful effort from anyone facing death, but made
more so by one who had so successfully brought science and medicine to the night tables of the world.
About Medicine or Disease
Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010) details the evolution of diagnosis and
treatment of cancer from ancient Egypt to the
latest breakthroughs. A large book detailing an
exhaustive account, Emperor won a Pulitzer Prize in
2011 before becoming the basis of a PBS miniseries. It would be reasonable to feel surprise that a
600+ page book on cancer could be a bestseller.
As The New Yorker said of the book, “It’s hard to
Oliver Sacks
Eric Topol
June 2016