LEADING A DOUBLE LIFE_001

Leading A Double Life

Hi, everyone, and welcome to episode 1 of my podcast Leading A Double Life. I’m Kwei Quartey, a physician and author of the Inspector Darko Dawson novels. On my podcast, stories of what it’s like to be a medical doctor and a writer. This episode, Doctor-Writer, Incorporated. We’re going to look at a well-established but curious bond between writing and being a physician, and I’ll tell you a little bit about how it happened to me. We have records of doctor-writers as far back as the 5th century BC. Even St. Luke, one of the four Gospel authors, is said to have been a physician. John Keats, the English romantic poet who lived from 1795 to 1821, trained at Guy’s Hospital London. He had an aptitude for medicine, but he was ambivalent about it and feared he would never become the poet he wanted to be if he continued his medical training in earnest. He did continue up to getting his license, but ultimately, Keats chose poetry over surgery. On the other hand, Anton Chekhov, the great Russian playwright and short story writer born in 1860, practiced medicine throughout his medical career. Chekhov said, “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other.” Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of possibly the world’s most famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, began writing before he went into medicine and is said to have written his books while waiting for patients to show up. Apparently, they seldom did, and Doyle’s medical practice was never successful. Another physician writer was W Somerset Maugham, who trained and qualified as a physician, but never practiced. On successfully selling his first novel, Maugham abandoned his medical career. Two Harvard-trained physicians, Robin Cook and Michael Crichton, were phenomenally successful writers. Cook, an ophthalmologist, continued his practice while writing bestselling medical thrillers like Coma and Outbreak. On the other hand, Crichton, who died in 2008, dumped medicine on graduating. He never even got a license to practice. One of his quotes is, “Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.” Crichton could not have been more spot-on. Khaled Hosseini, a contemporary of mine who sold a gazillion copies of The Kite Runner and other tour de force novels, practiced medicine in the same medical group as me, but for obvious reasons he left after The Kite Runner became so successful. I’d like to mention also Janet Asimov, who was a psychiatrist and wrote science-fiction and non-fiction; and Abraham Verghese, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine and the author of the highly acclaimed Cutting For Stone. Dr. Verghese, an inspiring teacher, said, “I wanted the reader to see how entering medicine was a passionate quest, a romantic pursuit, a spiritual calling, a privileged yet hazardous undertaking.” So, we see from these examples there’s no set pattern as to whether these authors became doctors first, or the other way around. In my case, I wanted to be a writer from the early age of eight or nine. I typed or hand-wrote novellas, stapling the pages together between jacket covers I designed myself. My inspiration came from hundreds of books at home, both fiction and nonfiction. Most of all, I loved mysteries. My late Ghanaian father and my black American mother were both lecturers at the University of Ghana, where I grew up with my three brothers. My interest in medicine came years later in my early teens. My family and I were still living in Ghana at the time, and I was set on a science-intensive path that would take me to medical school. But circumstances became complicated at the beginning of my 2nd year. Not only did my father die of pancreatic cancer, but social and economic conditions in Ghana under the then military rule were abysmal. There was political unrest and frequent school and university closures. My mother came to the difficult decision to return home to New York and we, her sons, went with her. Now I faced the daunting task of getting into a new medical school. Through a combination of luck, doggedness, and hard work, I got into Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, DC. After graduating with my MD degree, I was tired of snow on the east coast, so I moved to southern California for my residency in Internal Medicine. During my training at the USC Medical Center in Los Angeles, I didn’t do any creative writing. Residency is an exhausting grind of long call hours and rounds with not enough sleep in between. After completing the training, I went through a strange period in which I felt anticlimactic about being a doctor. Hard to believe, but I was actually looking around for what other careers I could get into. I was sitting at a desk in the ICU of one of the hospitals in Los Angeles one morning and a nurse who knew me well asked me why I looked so despondent. I told her about the funk I was in, and she asked me: “Well, what else, besides medicine, do you want to do?” I said I’d always wanted to be a writer, to which she responded, “What’s stopping you?” Her observation, in the form of a question, was keen. Nothing was stopping me. So, with my love of writing rekindled, I began a creative writing course at UCLA extension, after which I continued several years in a writing group run by Marjorie Miller, who was a previous editor at Macmillan. I completed three novels during that time and attempted a few more that I didn’t finish. I self-published one of them, called Kamila, long before self-publishing became an okay thing to do in the publishing world. But it would be years before I would create my Inspector Darko Dawson series set in Ghana. The prototype character was quite different from the one in existence now. My original idea for him was taken from a French documentary I saw while vacationing in Paris in which a countryside detective in Cote d’Ivoire used the threat of witchcraft to make his suspects and witnesses talk. But for my novels, the rural setting seemed to be limiting, and although I’d observed rural life in Ghana, it was always from the outside in. I never lived it. Eventually then, Darko became an urban police detective who is often sent to remote parts of the country to solve crimes. I should say that when as I began the series, I had some catching up to do because I hadn’t been back to Ghana in some fifteen years, and the country had modernized significantly since I’d last been there, not to mention becoming a stable democracy. So to come full circle, why do doctors write, and in particular, fiction? What compels us to do it? Some people theorize that it’s a way to escape the burden we carry healing others—or trying to—and therefore it has a therapeutic value. Maybe so, but I have another theory that medical practice is the ultimate existential battle to alleviate what ails us. There’s a roadblock, though. Ironically, it’s the doctor himself or herself. A physician is human too—not infallible by any means, and capable of mistakes, sometimes big ones. The fight against illness and disease comes with wins and losses, and some of the time, doctors feel defeated, and it can be frightening discomfiting. But when we write fiction, we are absolutely in control. We determine the plot, characters, and the outcome. It’s a reassuring counterbalance to the unpredictable nature of medicine. So we write, and find ourselves restored with strength to work another day.