Monday, December 28, 2009

Story Specialists: Doctors Who Write (on NPR)

Do you enjoy writing? Perhaps you'd like to publish a book. Fiction, nonfiction, or science fiction? I'd enjoy writing some science fiction stories someday. Doctors deal with unique circumstances like death, birth, terminal illnesses like cancer, and surgery. Who else knows what it feels like to be operating on someone's brain or to be holding an organ in your hand? Who else can write about the experience of reviving someone during a Code Blue situation?

On NPR, there's a story titled, "Story Specialists: Doctors Who Write." The story starts with:
It's not uncommon for writers to have a day job. Lawyers write. Soldiers and teachers write. But there seems to be a special connection between the medical profession and the art of writing. The list of doctors who are also novelists, playwrights and poets is long, and quite impressive: Anton Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, W. Somerset Maugham and Arthur Conan Doyle, to name just a few...
You can have the opportunity to read some excerpts from these noted physician authors:
  • Abraham Verghese, MD, is a professor at Stanford University's School of Medicine and the author of the New York Times best-seller My Own Country: A Doctor's Story. Cutting for Stone is his first novel.
  • Terrence Holt, MD, PhD, is a specialist in geriatrics and a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. In the Valley of the Kings is his first book.
Click here to read the NPR story titled, "Story Specialists: Doctors Who Write."

1 comment:

  1. Check out Waves - a 21st century incarnation of Faust with lots of medical narrative.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waves_(novel)

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