Wordcraft -- A methodology for writing, research & life

The annual Literature + Medicine conference at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas is turning into one of my favorite small writers’ conferences. Despite the long, illustrious history of literary doctors, a familiarity with literature isn’t the first criteria that comes to my mind when choosing a doctor. But that’s something the conference’s director, cardiologist Dr. John F. Harper aims to change, with lectures from such award-winning writers as Abraham Varghese (Cutting for Stone), Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains and Strength in What Remains) and this year’s speaker, John M. Barry (Rising Tide and The Great Influenza). This year’s conference, the fourth, added a poetry lecture by physician/poet Rafael Campo (The Poetry of Healing).

Dr. Harper first combined literature and medicine in a course for medical residents intended to build communication skills. As the conference grew, he found medical personnel wanting to move beyond reading and discussion to writing, and a writing contest was added. The 2013 conference this month received more than seventy essays, short stories and poems.  Writings of the contest winners are available online at www.texashealth.org/litmed/.

The most recent medical writing from 2013 speaker John M. Barry, The Great Influenza, “should be required reading for anyone who wants to go into medicine,” Harper said. “I think we take for granted some of the medical advances we have, the magnitude of this great pandemic, and the likelihood that it could happen again.”

Barry wryly admitted that as a teenager he was torn between a career in writing and a career as a clinician, finally deciding on writing after his parents shut down his early attempts at bacteriological experiments.

“What is the connection between literary understanding and medicine?” he asked the audience gathered in the Fogelson Forum of the Presbyterian Hospital. “It’s the methodology”--specifically, the testing of hypotheses.

“Every true writer shares one essential element with scientists--trying to express something that is true and important, that gets back to methodology.”

So what is Barry’s methodology as he begins tasks such as the seven year long writing of The Great Influenza? And why is it so applicable to writing in general, and to so many other aspects of life that I took notes the entire time he spoke?

“It starts by questioning yourself,” he said. “The first thing is, I try to remain aware, aware of my biases. This doesn’t turn my biases into strengths, but it can limit their dangers.”

As part of this self-awareness, he asks himself four major questions: what happened, that is, what exactly is being investigated; how it happened, or the mechanism; why it happened; and “the key to creativity and the key to imagination, the most important question--so what?”

The “so what?” question he finds so important he’s been known to post it in his writing space, for the help it provides in setting his priorities. I’ll add it to my list of questions to answer, even in writing fiction.

With those questions in mind, he investigates in what he terms vertical and horizontal dimensions--vertical for “diving deep into a subject” and horizontal for “looking for connections. As soon as you make the connections, it’s so obvious, nobody can figure out why they weren’t thought of before.”

And the advantage of the vertical dimension, the in depth dimension? “Sometimes you can make an observation that’s so brilliant it illuminated the world.”

For more about Barry, his writing, and his on-going interest in civic activism, see
www.johnmbarry.com/.

Wordcraft -- Literature: it's good medicine

Among the things needed “to do medicine,” cardiologist John F. Harper told the audience gathered for this fall’s Literature + Medicine Conference in Dallas, the acquisition of humanitarian ideals ranks alongside medical knowledge and research. Ideals, he insisted, are “the reason many of us decided to become doctors. . . Like the doctor who came in the middle of the night and put his hand on my dad until he was free of pain.”

In pursuit of what Dr. Harper termed this “soul of medicine,” he founded a Literature and Medicine course for residents at Texas Presbyterian Health, and sits on the committee to organize a Literature + Medicine conference, now in its third year. The conference sponsors a writing competition for medical professionals and brings together speakers on the subject of the intersection of literature and medicine.

“Literature startles us,” Dr. Harper said, “and sometimes provokes us. It sharpens our listening skills (and) allows us to learn from those who have gone before us.”

This year’s major speaker, Tracy Kidder, isn’t a doctor (although his daughter is). He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose foray into medical writing began with the publication in 2003 of Mountains Beyond Mountains, the story of physician Paul Farmer’s work on the global health crises of AIDS and tuberculosis in some of the poorest countries in the world.

“Mountains Beyond Mountains is a wonderful piece of literature,” Dr. Harper said, introducing Kidder. “But what got my attention was the (medical) residents who would say this book changed their view of being a doctor.”

Kidder’s most recent book is Strength in What Remains, the story of Deo (Deogratias Niyizonkiza), a survivor of genocide in the East African nation of Burundi, only alive “because he left the door to his room unlocked and the men who came to kill him assumed he had already escaped,” Kidder said.

Deo fled to the United States, but found his situation only barely improved, iving on the streets, “avoiding the eyes of strangers when he entered (New York’s) Central Park at night to sleep, because they would know he was homeless.”

Kidder first saw Deo only as an anonymous face in a crowd. But with the aid of Kidder and a group of friends, Deo attained the stability to finish his education at Harvard’s School of Public Health and Dartmouth Medical School. Not content to keep this good fortune to himself, Deo returned to Burundi to establish a public clinic, Village Health Works.

“The storyteller’s job is to cast the reflections of enduring human beings on the page,” Kidder said. “I didn’t set out to go a good deed. I set out to write a good story (but) I was very much moved by what I saw. I hope I will never look at anonymous faces that same way again.”

Kidder continues his involvement with Deo and the growing influence of the Village Health Works clinic. For more information about Dr. Niyizonkiza and his work, see www.villagehealthworks.org/. 

And if you work in a medical profession and are interested in the Literature + Medicine conference’s 2013 writing contest, please see the information at
www.texashealth.org/body_subsite.cfm?id+4696/.

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(Not that we couldn't see this coming, but shortly after posting today, I learned Duotrope Digest has stopped begging for money and gone to charging -- at least, beginning January 1, 2013.  Cost of a prepaid subscription is $5 a month or $50 a year, payable in U.S. dollars.  For details, including payment options, see www.duotrope.com/.)