DUAL ROLE: Dr. Abraham Verghese speaking on ``What the pen teaches the stethoscope: Reflections on writing and medicine" at the St. John's National Academy of Health Sciences in Bangalore on Tuesday. — Photo: K. Murali Kumar

Bangalore: Medical practice is a good training for a writer as the field is replete with human tales of pain, suffering, courage and healing. But are there tools in a writer's bag of tricks that could prove useful to doctors?

Yes, and in plenty, argued celebrated writer-doctor Abraham Verghese in the Dr. Chitra Stephen Solomon Memorial Oration, organised by St. John's National Academy of Health Sciences, here on Tuesday.

Best-selling author of My Own Country and The Tennis Partner and the Director of Centre for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Centre, Dr. Verghese spoke on "What the pen teaches the stethoscope: Reflections on writing and medicine."

Drawing on literary sources from Anton Chekhov to John Berger, as well as his own experiences in the profession, Dr. Verghese said doctors should not forget their "role as catalysts" in the human stories they encountered every day.

"Voice of medicine"

Every patient who walked into a clinic was a character in "intense conflict," waiting his "moment of epiphany": two principle ingredients of a good story. Whether or not this story got reduced to a medical jargon ("a diabetic in bed no. 3") depended on how the doctor translated the "voice of patient" to the "voice of medicine."

Process of translation

This process of translation could not be done away with, conceded Dr. Verghese, but asserted that it was vital to "keep the voice of the patient ringing in the ear."

Literature could play an important role in ensuring that the human voice was not completely drowned out by the cold language of scientific reasoning.

"A doctor, who reads, could perhaps see that medicine was not all about curing but was also about healing," he said.

Dr. Verghese spoke about how he chose to specialise in infectious diseases with the belief that it was an area of medicine that cured people. But as irony would have it, "HIV landed in my lap."

An infection without cure, it taught those "caught in the conceit of cure" the importance of healing.

Larger human picture

Without a connection with literature and reading, a doctor could suffer "the terrible and crippling atrophy of the imaginative faculty," as John Fowles put it, and lose sight of the larger human picture, said Dr. Verghese.

He quoted Dorothy Allison, who said: "Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth as to how the rest of the world lives."

Translated to a doctor's world, Dr. Verghese said, literature could be that bridge on which the "patient's humanity" encountered the "physician's humanity."

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