Recognitions: Doctors and Their Stories: A Collection of Original Works in Celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the Center for Literature, Medicine and the Health Care Professions (review)

Carol Donley and Martin Kohn, eds. Recognitions: Doctors and Their Stories: A Collection of Original Works in Celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the Center for Literature, Medicine and the Health Care Professions. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002. 177 pp. Paper, $12.

When you think about it, writing is a common, almost natural activity for a doctor. Medical students spend a lot of time with pen in hand; they read books and case descriptions written by experienced elders, and when they get into practice, they write down their notes, keep files, and send letters, which other doctors will read and which will often trigger more writing. It would seem inevitable that this daily writing should somehow be infected by the doctors' emotions, prejudices, personal ethics, and inner demons. It would seem inevitable that the innumerable lives a doctor encounters and assists in his or her life should inspire writing. Since most readers love stories about life and death, no wonder doctors should leave their textbooks and case descriptions to start publishing stories. Recognitions summarizes almost everything one might expect to find in literature written by physicians: emotion, plot twists, insight, surprise, sadness, and humor soaring from patients' and doctors' lives. The collection also demonstrates that essays and stories written by physicians may have much in common without being redundant. The eighteen contributions included were edited in sections reflecting the way many physicians see their profession, that is, from three different and yet complementary perspectives.

In the beginning, long before they begin clinical practice, doctors become acquainted with medicine and health care through their elders' writings and experience. The first section in the book thus contains essays on literary texts written by physicians. Understandably, William Carlos Williams is a focal point. In "The Help of Dr. Williams," Robert Coles tells how he met the "New Jersey Doc" after one of his teachers suggested he might (and he reluctantly did) send him his thesis; in "The Same River Twice: My Education in William Carlos Williams," an essay retracing both his career and his relationship to Williams's poetry, John Stone acknowledges a debt of his own, ending on an encounter with William Eric Williams, W.C.W.'s elder son. Both essays are enlightening, thanks to the authors' humor, their personal insights, and the experiences in both medical care and poetry they share with the reader. The contribution that follows, Rafael Campo's "Healing and Poetry: Representations of Illness in Contemporary American Poetry," is less satisfying, perhaps because the size of the essay doesn't quite fit the scope of the intended project. Campo's beliefs in the comforting, if not healing, properties of poetry are attractive to the mind, but the pieces and analyses he presents in defense of his theory fall short of being totally convincing. Perhaps this particular paper could be the blueprint for a longer, book-length work.

When they become full-fledged doctors, all physicians have to consider their practice both on an individual and a community level; thus, the second and third sections of Recognitions ("Grand Perspectives" and "Intimate Experiences") focus on doctors' interactions with the surrounding world or individual patients, addressed through fiction or remembrance. These fifteen contributions impressively illustrate the variety of subjects, points of view, styles, and narrative forms physician-writers use to tell their stories. Even though Section II deals mostly with doctors as professionals and Section III with doctors as individuals, the reader can see at once that each single piece could fit in either section. All the pieces in this collection demonstrate both a deep understanding of the human issues of medicine and the finest craft in writing, but some are more successful than others at...