The Stethoscope and the Pen

The Hindu

6 hours ago

Published : Jun 18, 2025 17:39 IST - 6 MINS READ
Dear reader,
This begins, as most things do in medicine, with a case history. In the late 19th century, one of the most prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was not a lexicographer or a linguist, but a doctor: Dr William Chester Minor. He was a retired US Army surgeon. He lived in an asylum for the criminally insane after committing a murder in a fit of paranoid delusion. There, amid hallucinations and despair, he sent thousands of entries to the OED's editor, James Murray. The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words by British writer Simon Winchester tells the story in vivid detail.
It is ironic that the English language—especially its modern variant in which you're reading this newsletter—bears the imprint of a doctor who had both healed and harmed. No wonder, then, that so many doctors handle language with surgical precision. And they have produced quite an impressive line-up of literary works that continue to amaze us.
Physician-writers have long been among our most haunting chroniclers. Greek physician Hippocrates, known more for his oath than his prose, left behind case notes that can be read like proto-stories: terse, elliptical, full of mystery. During the Islamic Golden Age, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) wrote The Canon of Medicine, but also philosophical treatises that were poetic. Conversely, one of his most popular works has such a curiously Instagram-ish title—The Book of Healing—that reels will be made on it if Gen Z discovers it.
In 11th-century Italy, Trotula of Salerno, a female physician, wrote pioneering texts on women's medicine, interspersed with interesting takes that today read as proto-feminist.
Jump forward to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and we find a string of European doctor-writers—Chekhov in Russia, deeply attuned to the moral fevers of society; Axel Munthe in Sweden, whose The Story of San Michele mingled ghost story, travelogue, and psychological insight with wry, clinical detachment. 'A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself,' Munthe wrote.
Doctors, it is said, are like priests. They see men at their worst and at their best, when all pretence is gone. I'd like to believe it is this access to raw, unadorned human experience, life's thresholds and endings, that gives doctors a peculiar vantage point. They witness what most of us only guess at. And when some of them choose to write, their words often possess the kind of authority that only suffering—and the attempt to ease it—can confer.
In our times, a bunch of authors embody the archetype elegantly. I'll start with Siddhartha Mukherjee, whose Pulitzer-winning The Emperor of All Maladies made the grim history of cancer into something luminous, almost operatic. Mukherjee, a cell biologist, moves effortlessly from the granular language of genes to the grand arcs of history and myth. His more recent book, The Gene: An Intimate History, is as much about heredity as it is about inheritance, body, trauma, memory, and beyond.
Atul Gawande takes a different tack. His writing, especially in Being Mortal, studies not just death, but the systems that fail us as we age. A surgeon with scalpel-sharp prose, Gawande's gift is for laying bare the limits of modern medicine. He focusses on the need to focus on our well-being rather than on our survival.
Then there's Abraham Verghese, part physician, part novelist. His writing, be it the sprawling novel Cutting for Stone (2009) or the latest, The Covenant of Water, pulses with a love for language and for the strange, sustaining rituals of medicine.
The Kodagu-based Kavery Nambisan is a surgeon whose books, The Hills of Angheri and The Story that Must Not Be Told, eschew romanticism. She writes of rural India, of ethical decay, of dignity in dying. Her writing is political in the best way: not polemical, but attentive to class, caste, and the compromises made by the poor and the principled.
One of the most beautiful contributions to this genre is Vikram Paralkar's underrated work The Afflictions, a surreal, Borgesian catalogue of imaginary diseases that reads like a cross between a clinical manual and a dream journal. It reminds us of how thin the line is sometimes between medicine and myth.
What is it that we're really reading when we read a doctor's prose?
We are reading, perhaps, someone who has seen too much. Someone whose vocabulary must stretch to accommodate grief, whose syntax has absorbed the rhythms of suffering. A line of poetry that comes to mind is from Emily Dickinson—not a doctor, but certainly acquainted with illness:
'After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –'
I think this is what many physician-writers bring to the table: a language for that 'formal feeling', a lexicon for loss that neither wallows nor looks away.
It was only recently—when an intern at Frontline mentioned it to me—that I heard the term 'medical humanities'. For those who haven't heard of it either, medical humanities is what happens when you admit that the body is more than a machine, and healing more than a technical fix. It's a restless, interdisciplinary field that brings together philosophy, literature, ethics, history, art, religion—even theatre and film—with medicine, not to romanticise illness, but to understand it in its full, human context. It asks what pain means, not just how to measure it. It explores the murky, often invisible dimensions of caregiving, suffering, and survival that clinical charts can't capture. In a world where science often speaks in numbers, medical humanities insists on stories.
In more than one way, all writing by doctors are solid contributions to this new-found literary spinoff. Medical schools in the US and the UK are now incorporating literature and narrative ethics into their curricula. India, still catching up, might do well to listen. Because illness is never just cellular—it's social, cultural, linguistic. A cancer diagnosis lands differently in a Mumbai slum than in a penthouse in New Delhi. A doctor who can understand that difference—not just treat it, but write it—can rehumanise a field that often feels like it's grinding through bodies at industrial scale.
Which brings me, inevitably, to Paul Kalanithi. His When Breath Becomes Air is that rarest of things: a book that breaks you quietly, then leaves you grateful for the shattering. Diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at the cusp of his career as a neurosurgeon, Kalanithi began writing about his illness with eerie clarity and grace. I once reviewed the book—and carried the weight of it for weeks. 'Even if I'm dying,' he wrote, 'until I actually die, I am still living.'
It is one of life's odd and lovely ironies that so many of our most healing stories come not from novelists or poets, but from doctors. As the dictionary-building Dr Minor proved, even in madness and despair, a doctor can give language new life.
Which is precisely why Frontline is thrilled to introduce a new column by the brilliant doctor-duo 'Kalpish Ratna' (Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed), titled 'Hello, Fingertip' where the surgeons will be looking at how humans can reconnect with their 'sentient selves'. Read it here (it's free!) and let us know your thoughts. Also, write back with your favourite doctor-writers, in any language.
Wishing you a healthy week ahead,
Jinoy Jose P.
Digital Editor, Frontline
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