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Life in Medicine: A Literary Anthology |
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By Robert Coles, MD, and Randy Testa, Editors
Review
by Vincent J Felitti, MD
New
York: The New Press; 2002. ISBN 1-56584-729-6. 329 pages. $27.95.
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Practicing
medicine can be--and often is--an extraordinary experience because of
the insight given us into other lives and because of its intensity,
intellectual stimulation, and social importance. Nonetheless, we easily
lose sight of this aspect of our profession when we are immersed in
the pressures of everyday matters. Fortunately, books like A Life
in Medicine sometimes come along to remind and reinspire us.
A Life
in Medicine is an anthology of stories, poems, and extracts of books
that help us to achieve a deeper understanding of what we do as medical
doctors. Wonderful reading in itself, the book is also a meaningful
introduction to the works of writers ranging from Anton Chekhov and
Lewis Thomas to obscure physician-authors who have a superb talent for
describing what they see and experience in medical practice.
Robert
Coles is an unusual physician: He is a family friend of Ezra Pound and
a medical student protégé of William Carlos Williams.
He is a psychiatrist-sociologist who, as a teacher of literature at
Harvard University, helps us understand our lives and what we do in
medical practice, where we have the privilege of participating in the
great dramatic moments of our patients' lives. The feel of A Life
in Medicine is at times reminiscent of Williams' Doctor Stories,1
and the book's concept is similar to that of Norman Cousins' The
Physician in Literature.2 Perhaps these similarities
should come as no surprise, because, as stated in the Preface,
"The work of medicine in considerable part rests on the doctor's
ability to listen to the stories that patients tell; to make sense of
these often chaotic narratives of illness ... and to understand what
these narratives mean at multiple (and sometimes contradictory) levels
...."3
This book
is a valuable resource for physicians who wish to explore the meaning
of their professional lives. The stories and poems selected are wonderful,
sad, insightful, and occasionally funny. Not only can they help us see
our work through the eyes of patients and families but also through
our own eyes when, as sometimes happens, we have become sufficiently
distracted by work and responsibility to no longer fully appreciate
both what we do and our unusual relationship with others. Ours is a
profession that fosters loneliness, and an early article by Coles describes
this risk of being a physician: "In search for closeness he craves
knowledge; and in search of knowledge he finds psychology. Psychology
becomes a substitute for love, for intimacy ...."3:309
David Loxtercamp, a family doctor in Maine, closes the anthology with
a piece containing these lines: "For the battle-worn physician,
our Waterloo waits in the stack of messages at the end of the day ....
We recognize it in unwritten cards of condolence, our cowardice to confront
addiction or abuse, the contempt we feel for self-destructive patients,
and the encounters we crimp with a blood test or prescription when another
five minutes with the doctor would do. How we respond to patients--in
mood and action--reflects the core of the physician we are striving
to become."3:319 Like Coles' earlier book, The Call
of Stories,4 this one reminds us, amid all the other
things we seek to get, to get understanding.
References
- Williams
WC. The doctor stories. Robert Coles, editor. New York: New Directions;
1984.
- Cousins
N, editor. The physician in literature. Philadelphia: Saunders Press;
1982.
- Coles
R, Testa R, O'Donnell J, Armstrong P, Anderson MB, editors. A life
in medicine: a literary anthology. New York: New Press; 2002.
- Coles
R. The call of stories: teaching and the moral imagination. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin; 1989.
