My relationships with my patients have been sharpened and deepened by my writing. They are happy to see us healthcare workers as human beings. However, my writing has polarized my relationships with colleagues. Almost without exception, people will take sides, as if they were on one side or the other. Some people want us to create an image of them as saints. Some people want to present us as the bad guys wreaking havoc on the world while lining our pockets with money in the name of Hippocrates and Flo Nightingale. And some of us are tired of trying to maintain an extreme appearance and want to be portrayed as the people we are. In the most personal writing I’ve ever written, my motives, ethics, values, training, courage, and objectivity were all praised by some and challenged by others. . In actual patient care, the focus is on others. When writing, the focus is on you, your emotions, ideas, and perceptions. Without those elements, writing for me would be little more than a nurse’s notes on a chart.
Oliver Sacks, Neurologist: “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”
“The following notes on my own case have been rejected by every medical journal to which I have provided them. . . . However, one or two people whose judgment I trust have written them in a dry format. As they advised me to print my story without all the personal details…I succumbed to their opinion.”
So Silas Weir Mitchell, a young neurologist with a growing reputation, began, with some hesitation, “The Case of George Dedroe,” which he published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1866. This case is based on a somewhat fictionalized but personally known incident. For him, this medicine was distinguished by the precision of its clinical descriptions, its level of empathy, its mastery of language, and its boldness of imagination never seen in medical treatises. It captured the imagination of the public and irritated his colleagues. I can’t help but sympathize with Mitchell’s predicament, his ambiguous position between medicine and literature. But unlike Mitchell, who later wrote many novels, I have no literary aspirations at all, only a desire to richly report clinical reality. T. Berry Brazelton, Pediatrician: “Work and Compassion” Having been trained in medical pathology, when I completed my pediatric training I realized that although I was capable of treating pediatric diseases, I realized that I couldn’t meet my parents’ demands for guidance. in raising children. Although it is not the sole responsibility of the medical community to compensate for the loss of extended family members and the resulting loss of parental confidence, no academic discipline is so well-equipped to participate in and influence family life. There is nothing else like it. Writing for parents strengthened my belief that it is necessary and possible to combine these medical and social values.
Fitzhugh Mullan, Pediatrician: “Vital Signs: A Young Doctor’s Fight Against Cancer.”
When I was a medical student, the first time I saw a patient, I was struck by the differences in the people and families I observed in their reactions to illness, health, each other, and me. I have had the wonderful opportunity to visit people’s worlds one after another and observe their lives at their convenience. The doctor was a human naturalist who enriched and actually dominated my writing. Writing has had a special impact on my role as a physician. A patient recently told me, “I read your book.” I know you very well,” she said, satisfied and even pleased. Writing provides a rare but welcome democracy and intimacy between the doctor, her patients, and her colleagues.
David Hilfiker, Family Physician: “Wound Healing: A Doctor Looks at His Work.”
As a physician working in inner-city poverty and oppression, I am often overwhelmed by the weakness and helplessness of my patients. Writing is an opportunity to think about what could be and what should be. When we push the poor into ghettos, we cut out the damaged and abandoned parts of ourselves, refusing to face the victim within ourselves, rejecting our own brokenness. Writing about your work creates balance. Doctors are my roots and write my wings.
