Literary physicians

Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Someset Maugham, William Carlos Williams were all medical men who sought and found fame and glory through their writing.

Today, Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, Vincent Lam and Kevin Patterson carry on the tradition. Increasingly, medical men (doctor-writers are still primarily male) are turning to...more »

Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Someset Maugham, William Carlos Williams were all medical men who sought and found fame and glory through their writing.

Today, Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, Vincent Lam and Kevin Patterson carry on the tradition. Increasingly, medical men (doctor-writers are still primarily male) are turning to journalism, with writers like Jerome Groopman and Oliver Sacks dominating the pages of the New York Times and the New Yorker, feeding a new insatiable public interest in all things medical. And even more recently, doctors have taken to blogging - that most democratic of forums - as an outlet for their writerly urges.

This Shelfari group explores the question, "What makes doctors write?" « less