A Comparative Study of Physician-Writers’ Representations of What Makes a Good Doctor

Abstract

This thesis draws on the work of the Narrative Medicine movement and offers for the firsttime a comparative study of the creative representations of what makes a good doctor byeight physician-writers from a range of cultural backgrounds. What makes a good doctor isone of the central concerns in medical practice, especially as medicine is increasinglycriticised for being practised too scientifically and technically and with insufficient artistryand humanity. Creative works by the eight doctor-writers offer readers a much more humanunderstanding of the challenges involved in being a good doctor, compared with more seriousand less accessible scholarly and academic writings. The eight doctor-writers chosen for thisstudy represent those most quoted with respect to questions of medical ethics in their owntime and place. The study takes an innovative comparative approach that lifts the question ofthe literary treatment of what constitutes good medical practice beyond the context of a singleauthor or cultural context to enable the illumination of this question from multipleperspectives. The comparative reading of these works not only reveals the extent to whicheach doctor’s representation of the good doctor is influenced by such specificities as the formof writing, the doctor’s gender and specialty and the socio-cultural contexts on which thework is written, but also shows a remarkable commonality of concerns that transcends thesespecificities. The study is primarily carried out in Western cultural and medical contexts,although a Chinese physician-writer is introduced for comparison so as to add a valuableextra dimension to the discussion of what makes a good doctor. In the field of medicalhumanities, this research provides a complementary literary approach to current studies inmedical education; meanwhile in the field of comparative literature, it provides the firstsystematic study of “doctors who write creatively”.Keywordscomparative literature, physician-writers, creative writing, what makes a good doctor,medicine and literature, Narrative Medicine.