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Once it seemed the physician who could write was something of a rarity. There’s Oliver Sacks, Jerome Groopman, Atul Gawande. But I’m starting to think doc-lit might soon need its own section at Barnes and Noble.
A few weeks ago we talked with surgeon Paul Ruggieri, about his book Confessions of a Surgeon. Last year, Chris Adrian and Siddhartha Mukherjee were among our favorite guests on Science Friday. (Mukherjee’s book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer won the 2011 Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction.)
This winter there’s a new collection of doctors’ works you can bring to the waiting room with you. Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction And Nonfiction by Doctors includes 16 essays by doctors (including Sacks and Gawande), and is edited by physician and writer Leah Kaminsky (who also wrote one of the essays). Ethan Canin’s “We Are Nighttime Travelers,” a look at aging and love, brought me to tears. (OK, I was reading it on a bus on the New Jersey Turnpike, but still….)
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