Doctor Writers?

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Famous writers who studied law are legion. Can you list any great writers who studied medicine?

― Michael White (Hereward), Wednesday, 28 January 2004 20:57 (twenty-one years ago)

Ethan Canin - i think he may still be a doctor in fact.

― jed_ (jed), Wednesday, 28 January 2004 21:23 (twenty-one years ago)

Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams come to mind.

― mck (mck), Wednesday, 28 January 2004 21:36 (twenty-one years ago)

michael crichton. oh, wait, great writers. well, the andromeda strain was pretty great.

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 28 January 2004 22:39 (twenty-one years ago)

The amazing thing about Michael Crichton is not that he's a great writer or anything, but that he worked his way through medical school writing medical thrillers (I think A Case of Need is the only one that turns up regularly these days). In the two months that he had off school, he would sit down and bang out a novel, one draft only, and the money he made from it paid his way through the next term. I think that's pretty impressive.

Wasn't Arthur Conan Doyle a pathologist?

― accentmonkey (accentmonkey), Thursday, 29 January 2004 11:35 (twenty-one years ago)

Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Merde!

― NickB (NickB), Thursday, 29 January 2004 15:06 (twenty-one years ago)

Robin Cook.

― Joseph J. Finn, Thursday, 29 January 2004 16:01 (twenty-one years ago)

I believe JG Ballard is a medical school drop out.

― earlnash, Thursday, 29 January 2004 17:13 (twenty-one years ago)

James Herriot! okay, so he tended to sheep, but still....

― scott seward (scott seward), Thursday, 29 January 2004 18:54 (twenty-one years ago)

Walker Percy -- He started writing after being infected with TB
at a hospital.

― Steve Walker (Quietman), Thursday, 29 January 2004 21:45 (twenty-one years ago)

Well, you know, Oliver Sacks.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 30 January 2004 04:28 (twenty-one years ago)

Mikhail Bulgakov (try A Country Doctor's Notebook for size). As mentioned upthread, Chekhov was a doctor: "Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress. When I get tired of one I go to the other."
He didn't appear to be too strong on diagnosing himself, however. Following a haemorrhage, he distanced himself from the situation, describing his blood's torrent as "the rage of a distant fire".

― Canada Briggs (Canada Briggs), Friday, 6 February 2004 15:54 (twenty-one years ago)

I think Walker Percy was studying medicine when he got consumption and started writing instead.

― otto, Friday, 6 February 2004 17:50 (twenty-one years ago)

I worked at a Chicago literary agency and regularly rejected medical thrillers from bored surgeons. There was something really disturbing about all these doctors spacing off midsurgery, dreaming about their novels.

― Catty (Catty), Monday, 9 February 2004 12:26 (twenty-one years ago)

The poet Rafael Campos.

― rams, Saturday, 14 February 2004 17:11 (twenty-one years ago)

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