Doctor Stories 5 comments

By Brian Volck

“We are surprised if the doctor, by stealing some hours from his daily avocations, attains even moderate eminence in the path of literature.” –Edward Berdoe

Incredulity, boredom, a patronizing “isn’t that nice”: these are a few of the responses I receive when folks in or out of the medical profession learn I write in my copious spare time. Atul Gawande, Sherwin Nuland, Oliver Sacks, and Abraham Verghese aside, it strikes many people odd that a doctor would do something so–how to put it?–unproductive.

Yet physician-writers go back as far as Hippocrates and Saint Luke, and Dr. Daniel Bryant has done us the favor of compiling a library of over three hundred physician writers at New York University.

I’m confident other professions, such as lawyers and clergy, produce least as many authors, but it’s worth pausing to ask why some doctors grow so addicted to the pen? Surely the reasons are complex, but I believe a major factor is that, in the course of a physician’s work day, patients continually pour out their life stories. Like lawyers and clergy, physicians are privileged to hear, in confidence, the intimacies and secrets of complete strangers who reveal events and concerns not known by a patient’s spouse or closest friends. Over time, the attentive doctor may glimpse the real story beneath the many stories a community’s residents tell.

William Carlos Williams said as much – and said it in his usual cantankerous and brutally honest way – in a chapter of his autobiography titled, “The Practice”:

Forget writing, it’s a trivial matter. But day in and day out, when the inarticulate patient struggles to lay himself bare for you, or with nothing more than a boil on his back is so caught off balance that he reveals some secret twist of a whole community’s pathetic way of thought, a man is suddenly seized again with the desire to speak of the underground stream which for a moment has come up just under the surface.

But what does all this revelatory storytelling have to do with a blog on art and faith? I can think of two connections. First, the Jewish and Christian traditions are defined by the stories of scripture, stories which make a claim upon the reader. The Passover Haggadah and the gospel passion accounts, for example, are stories Jews and Christians enter, and it is from within these demanding stories that they glimpse the even more astonishing reality beyond them.

Second, the question implicit in any conversation between a patient and physician is the very one Parzival, the Grail Knight, so desperately needed to ask Anfortas, the Fisher King—namely, “What is wrong?”

Parzival, of course, suffered mightily between the first and second opportunities to ask his fateful question, because he needed to learn the crucial difference between curiosity and compassion. There’s a conflict, the engine of every story, imbedded in medical conversations: the threat of illness and suffering or, at very least, the desire to avoid them. What the doctor has to learn, I believe (the rough exterior of Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House to the contrary) is how to approach that conflict with compassion rather than mere intellectual curiosity. I don’t know how to teach that to young doctors, but I hope it can be learned. What it requires, among other things, is a lifelong habit of listening to stories. If that habit leads to the writing of new stories, so much the better.