Physicians practicing other occupations, especially literature.

Abstract

Literature has been the favored nonmedical pursuit of physicians probably because the practice of medicine is suffused with narratives, the patient's history being one. Arthur Conan Doyle regarded medicine as a "grim romance," Somerset Maugham as an opportunity to see "life in the raw," and William Carlos Williams treated "the patient as a work of art." These sentiments may be linked to humanistic medicine. At some medical schools, literature is taught in the context of and integrated with medicine in an attempt to enhance ethics and empathy which were explicitly expressed by some physician-writers.