Quote

I will say that there is an inordinate amount of medicine in my novels, especially the first one. There are a lot of medical things that happen. A hip fracture, three different kinds of lung cancer, pneumonia, blood poisoning, and so on.

Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.

I treated as few patients as I could as a medical student, and I never practiced medicine.

My doctor is wonderful. Once, in 1955, when I couldn't afford an operation, he touched up the X-rays.

I went in for an operation to remove a brain tumor.

To the patient, any operation is momentous.

Medicine may be the lens through which I see the world, but since I think of medicine as 'life +', a place where life is exaggerated and seen at its most vital and poignant, I'll be writing about life more than I will be writing about medicine.

I am not really sure how I got interested in medicine.

If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, my patients will not even be postponed. Another surgeon would step in and take over. The reason to do research and writing is that it at least makes me feel not entirely replaceable. If I didn't write, I don't know if I would do surgery.