Writing in the Clinic, or What Might Be Expressed?

Abstract

Hospitals and clinics are not conventional settings for creative writing courses. The practical, goal-directed tasks of caring for the sick seem to preclude the freedom of mind and abandon of time needed by the artist or dreamer or even diarist. The smells and sounds of bodily maladies condense, if not reduce, the imagination, and the immediate needs of sick people seem to outweigh the clinician’s desire to write about that sickness. Everybody knows that William Carlos Williams had a typewriter in his pediatric office and dashed off poems between examining bawling patients, and that Chekhov survived his awful public health stretch at Sahkalin Island, the prison camp in Siberia, to come home to write Cherry Orchard and “Ward Number Six,” but how many Williams’s or Chekhovs are there? Sadly, not many physicians publishing today have the talent and taste to qualify as writers at all.