The Published Word

I think this little snip from an article, The Unlikely Writer by Elizabeth Gudrais in Harvard Magazine (Sept/Oct 2009) about surgeon/writer Atul Gawande is a nice description of the benefit of writing a blog. In addition to agreeing with what he says, I would add that I write as much for myself as anybody else. I find it stimulating and enjoyable to have to pursue topics, and then to think about what I’ve posted throughout the rest of the day. I would not do this without the mild prompting of this blog. Anyway, here is the quote:

… Once a college sophomore with little interest in literature, Gawande now says he thinks in stories and feels a compulsion to write. In fact, he recommends that everyone do a bit of writing. “It makes no difference whether you write a paper for a medical journal, five paragraphs for a website, or a collection of poetry,” he said during a 2005 HMS commencement speech:

…by putting your writing out to an audience, even a small one, you connect yourself to something larger than yourself….An audience is a community. The published word is a declaration of membership in that community, and also of concern to contribute something meaningful to it.

[ … ]

On the desk in his office at the Brigham is a framed copy of Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” She describes a patient’s innards as “tubers and fruits/Oozing their jammy substances.” From the surgeon’s perspective, she writes: “I worm and hack in a purple wilderness.” Gawande notes that Plath, not a surgeon, nevertheless got things just right. “That,” he says, “is the really amazing thing, and that’s the difference between me and a real writer.”

He likes the Plath poem because it casts the surgeon in an ambiguous light. “Most writing about people in medicine casts them as either heroes or villains,” he says. “That poem captures the surgeon as a merely human, slightly bewildered, a little bit benighted person in a world that is ultimately beyond his control.”

I was given Gawande’s book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, which I doubt I would have bought and read on my own, and found it to be excellent. I especially like his stories about the time he spent working in India.

Though I’m obviously not in the medical profession, the Plath quote strikes a nerve right now. My little dog, Munchkin had a rather severe setback last week and had to be reopened (even with persistent flushing we couldn’t get all the dead flesh flushed out), cleaned out, and left with two fairly large openings in her abdomen so the stuff can drain. She’s now doing much better, but I am repeatedly (three times a day, flushing) looking at “jammy substances” as Plath puts it.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/