Enlightened Librarian: Physicians who write

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Physicians who write · Nov 29, 06:33 PM

There are physicians who write, and then there are physicians who write fiction, an even more rarified subset of that tiny, illustrious group. I recently finished Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, a rather stunning debut collection of short stories from a working emergency doctor, which won this year’s Giller Prize.

As a former devotee of St. Elsewhere and an admitted addict of House I have a weakness for the high drama of hospital procedurals. Lam scratches that itch, placing us among a group of connected characters who progress from pre-med longing to med-school angst to the moment-by-moment pressures of their early careers. One cannot help but admire Lam’s immense technical knowledge and his highly trained and disciplined imagination: his language is intricate and the pacing is brisk. Yeats wrote of the difficult choice between perfection of the work and of the life. Lam, it would appear, has achieved great things in his early 30s in two consuming and independent spheres of work. One hopes that he also has a life.

* * *