Fiction & Physicians: Medicine Through the Eyes of Writers

Irish psychiatrist McWilliams compiles essays, book reviews, and short bios (some previously published) for those readers “with an interest in medicine and literature, and the curious manner in which both are intertwined.” Though he calls his ambitious work “merely a snapshot” of the “popular culture created by—and about—doctors,” his modesty belies the collection’s impressive range of surveyed authors, including real doctors, like New Jersey pediatrician and consummate modernist poet William Carlos Williams (who once proclaimed that his medical practice allowed him “to follow the poor, defeated body” into the “secret gardens of the self”), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Michael Crichton. McWilliams also discusses writers who have used medical issues to explore the human condition and produce enduring classics, such as Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Bram Stoker (Dracula), Joseph Heller (Catch 22), and Albert Camus (The Plague). This survey will entertain literary scholars and medical students alike, but McWilliams’s grander goal is to persuade future writer-doctors to use their “raw and frank view of humanity” to show the rest of us how to enjoy life—or, as 18th-century doctor Oliver Goldsmith wrote, “at least teach us to endure it.” (July 24)