The Problematic Doctor Diary

I also think about this when I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and other Oliver Sacks classics. Books like this reveal what we all sort of know already: doctors, like other human beings, have opinions about their jobs and the people they work for, with, and beside. The myth that a medical professional could treat a patient without having an opinion is comforting, as is the delusion that you’re somehow one of the good patients. Maybe after you leave, the doctor will turn to a colleague and say, “there goes a person who’s really doing a great job with that thyroid issue.” But if they do, that won’t end up in one of these medical memoirs, in general. It’s not interesting enough.

Only The Standouts

It’s the tough cases that make it into doctor diaries. These are cases where the patient is little more than a leaf on the wind, and the wind is the traumatic hurricane of a physical or mental health breakdown. The wind is interesting. The way the doctor grapples with the crisis, a lone hero standing for the helpless against the forces of microbiotic nature, is interesting. But the leaf is often interchangeable with all the other leaves blowing in the same storm. Sometimes they’ve got some interesting color, but any “personality” usually must relate to the doctor’s struggle against their disease. You could almost have a doctor diary without a patient.

Even when a book is well-meaning and attempts to celebrate the patients who are both its medical and literary subjects, like Sacks often does and like Frank Vertosick does in When The Air Hits Your Brain, there’s a certain squickiness in the process of going from healthy person to sick body to entertainment. Ultimately, that’s what’s going on here: you’re being entertained. Atul Gawande is never going to teach you to be a surgeon via a work of popular nonfiction. Knowing that the doctor is aware of your lifelong music habit or the hopes that your parents have for you is nice, but it’s still being presented as a diverting story in a book.

Sometimes They’re Good

And yet, you’re also being educated on how the medical community views and treats patients. These books detail the immense pressure that doctors exist under, as well as the fact that most of them do care about you, even if their main job is to care about your disease. It’s conceivable that this is comforting to prospective patients who find the medical community, dense with lingo and obviously stressed out at the best of times, an intimidating monolith. At its best, this genre could be a wonderful thing for someone who is scared of doctors.