The first thing any practising doctor who also writes gets asked is, 'How do you find the time?' A combined career ought, in theory, to be perfectly possible: writers and doctors are both only trained observers. And there is a distinguished list of literary medics. But almost all end up doing one or the other. And if they are any good as writers, the stethoscope takes second place. There never seems to be time to do both properly.
But William Carlos Williams, the great Modernist poet, succeeded. Williams, who was born in 1883 and died in 1963 after a series of strokes, was not only a prolific poet, critic, novelist and dramatist, but also a life-long, full-time general practitioner in Rutherford, New Jersey. Although he could have easily set up a private in Manha
ttan, he chose instead to work in a working class industrial township with many recent immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe, who spoke little English.
His 'Doctor Stories' deal with crises understood by any contemporary inner-city GP: still birth, autopsy, patients who refuse examination or cannot understand reassurance, never-ending family consultations in broken English, the particular test of night-visiting. My visits are made to the concrete tower-blocks of Tower Hamlets in London's East End, and the new immigrants are from Vietnam and Bangladesh.
There is no other writer who deals with how to listen, how to care, how to be there at the moment of physical need. He must have jotted these feelings down on prescription pad or notebook, then transcribed them on his laboratory typewriter, when hammering often awoke his children. 'By the time we assembled for breakfast, he had probably already done an hour's stint', recalls his physician son William.
As much as his industry, his laconic tone is to be appreciated. His tenderness is hard-edged, his humanism slightly cynical; best of all, he is never sentimental about the oppressed. And there is the sheer quality of his literary work.
Williams is heroic because he was a prophet in his own land, because he reclaimed poetry from European-imitation academics and because he stayed a working doctor- and enjoyed it. 'I never felt, he wrote, 'that medicine interfered with me but rather that it was my food and drink, the very thing that made it possible to write'.
About William Carlos Williams written by Cristina Nuta for FamousWhy.com
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by Cristina Nuta -