In these days of fear, pandemic, and confinement, many artists have written poems and songs dedicated to healthcare personnel, touched by their example of courage, professionalism, and sacrifice. But neither catastrophes nor medicine are a new source of inspiration for literature, which over time has had numerous writers among its ranks and has served as a reference for others. Gustave Flaubert, whose father was a surgeon and was the model of the doctor who co-stars Madame Bovary, argued that to be a great writer you had to have “the gaze of the doctor”, that is, his ability to see others inside and empathize with his pain. And William Carlos Williams, a pediatrician and one of the renovating teachers of North American poetry, assures in his autobiography that the door of his practice, which had been open for more than forty years, “opened the door to the secret gardens of the mind” and that his pass through faculty gave him the idea to transfer his verses, famous for their cold emotion, “the meaning of surgical asepsis.” His most famous prose title is Medical stories.
Agatha Christie was a nurse during the First World War and she states in her memoirs that she would have been a lifetime if she had not married. He also says that while working in chemical laboratories he learned so many things about poisons that it occurred to him to write a police novel where to apply that knowledge. And that was not all. “One day,” he recalls, “a man appeared around who always carried a vial of curare on him because that, he said, made him feel powerful. It intrigued me so much that it was still there fifty years later, waiting for his chance to get into one of my books, when I conceived The mystery of Pale Horse. “
“My activities as a doctor have had a strong influence on my work as a writer, significantly expanding my field of observation and perception,” said Anton Chekhov, who cared for thousands of patients free of charge, did not give up his vocation until he forced to do tuberculosis and has numerous characters that reflect his profession, including doctors Astrov, Dorn and Efimych de Uncle Vania, Seagull and Hall number 6.
Among the great names of the letters some left the race or graduated but did not practice: James Joyce, Bertolt Brecht, Henrik Ibsen, André Breton or Paul Celan. The romantic genius John Keats graduated from Pharmacy, but he only worked on it for two years. Friedrich Schiller, the author of “Hymn to Joy,” forcibly served as a military doctor and ended up deserting. Others did not hang up the white coat until they established themselves as storytellers, the case of Arthur Conan Doyle, who before creating his Sherlock Holmes published notable scientific articles and who transferred much of his knowledge to his famous private detective and his companion, Dr. Watson.
In Spain there have been doctors who wrote, and very well like Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Carlos Castilla del Pino or Gregorio Marañón, and two great storytellers who studied medicine: Pío Baroja, who did it in Madrid and Valencia and came to practice in Cestona, before returning to the capital to take his family’s bakery; and Luis Martín Santos, a renowned psychiatrist who transpires in the construction of the characters of his memorable Time of silence.
This account could include Portuguese António Lobo Antunes, Germans Gottfried Benn and Alfred Döblin; but above all, he cannot forget Walt Whitman, also a nurse, in his case in the Civil War, and who attested to his experiences in his series Drum rolls, then incorporated into Leaves of Grass.One of them says it all: “With bandages and water in my hands, / I go to my wounded, without missing a moment, / to the place where they lie after the battle, / where their beautiful blood turns red Grass. / I am energetic with everyone even if I understand their pain./ One’s breath crackles like fire, / the other eyes are glassy, but life still struggles in them without giving up, / Another one does, and sighs: “Come sweet death! Oh beautiful and merciful death! ” / And another one turns his pleading eyes towards me. Poor boy! I don’t know you, / However, I think I could give up everything right now / to die for you / if this saved you. ”
– .
