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-two years ago)

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

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

Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams come to mind.

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

Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Merde!

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

Robin Cook.

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

I believe JG Ballard is a medical school drop out.

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

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

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

Well, you know, Oliver Sacks.

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

The poet Rafael Campos.

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

twenty-one years pass...

This is on my queue.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/15/oliver-sacks-put-himself-into-his-case-studies-what-was-the-cost

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 11 December 2025 22:26 (two months ago)

Júlio Dinís and Miguel Torga for Portuguese lit. Dinís has a poem griping about hypochondriacs.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Thursday, 11 December 2025 22:37 (two months ago)

Lewis Thomas, though he writes essays not fiction...

― m0stly clean (Slowsquatch), Thursday, 11 December 2025 23:37 (two months ago)

AI Overview
Getting to Know St. Luke, the Beloved Physician - Catholic ...
Saint Luke was a physician and the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. He is referred to as "the beloved physician" by Saint Paul in the New Testament and is the patron saint of physicians.

AI Overview
The traditional view holds that Matthew and John were apostles, while Mark (Peter's associate) and Luke (Paul's companion) were apostolic men, but modern scholarship largely sees the Gospels as written anonymously by later Christians using traditions, though rooted in apostolic teaching, with Mark and Luke often considered early sources, and Matthew and John possibly drawing from them and other traditions. The texts themselves are anonymous, with names assigned later, and while some scholars see direct apostolic authorship as unlikely, others find strong links to eyewitness accounts through apostolic figures like Peter and Paul.

― dow, Friday, 12 December 2025 01:49 (one month ago)

was watching the New Yorker documentary on Netflix last night and thinking about their staff writers/contributors who are physicians: Dhruv Khullar (who was in the doc) but also Atul Gawande and Jerome Groopman.

― jaymc, Friday, 12 December 2025 14:09 (one month ago)

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