As a young lawyer, I was fortunate to have a great friend, Edwin Guy Olmstead, M. D., as one of my mentors. Thirty years my senior, he became a source of advice and wisdom. He also loved literature and wrote fiction inspired by his medical practice.
I’ve been thinking lately of the long tradition of authors choosing doctors as main characters. Doctors see both the best — moments of loving self-sacrifice, and worst — indifference to suffering — of humankind. Which others of us are so intimately involved in the human condition?
My favorite doctors in recent fiction, specifically Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, are Marion Stone and Hema, the OB/GYN. When Hema returns to the hospital after a trip, she from learns that a friend laboring to give birth to twins is near death. Sari-clad Hema bursts into the operating theater, “hands on her hips, bosom heaving, nostrils flaring,” with “the bloodshot eyes of a dragon.”
I want her for my doctor.
Marion, one of a set of twins, born in Ethiopia to an absent surgeon, shows us how a love of medicine is born of curiosity and compassion, and how possessing a physician’s skill can actually change the world.
Just as Marion Stone becomes drawn into the turmoil of Ethiopia’s revolution, Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, in his novel of the same name, is caught up in Russia’s political upheaval. Both characters love deeply, are idealistic, and dedicated to healing.
Of course, some fictional doctors use their skills for bad ends. These often figure in stories of redemption. In House Girl, Tara Conklin gives us Dr. Caleb Harper, an alcoholic disgrace who sinks to examining escaped slaves who have been caught and beaten to report whether they can, or can’t, do further work, thus being worth keeping alive. When the artist Josephine, disfigured and desperate, touches his heart, he helps her, and later joins the Union army.
Robert Louis Stevenson created the ultimate doctor torn between good and evil with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll is experimenting with ways humans can control their immoral sides. He finds to his sorrow, that the answers don’t lie in pharmaceuticals.
However, medicine often includes prescribing drugs. In my thriller, Remarkable Silence, I have Moses visit an Egyptian physician who provides him with previously unknown morphine to relieve his pain as he struggles to reach the Jordan.
Most doctors, I believe, are good men and women. Doctors make great subjects for fiction. They’re intelligent, curious, compassionate, and often dedicated to their work. More than most, they experience and know what it means to be fully human.
Who’s your favorite fictional physician?