The Notebook
Medicine and Fiction: Two Ways of Seeing
Medicine and fiction can seem to belong to different rooms. One demands evidence, precision and clinical responsibility; the other may invent, displace and make visible what never happened. Yet they share a fundamental discipline: observation.
In medicine, looking is not enough. One must distinguish what matters from what is incidental, recognise patterns, listen to what a person says and also to what they cannot quite say. An observation acquires value only when it becomes part of a decision.
Fiction does something similar with different materials. A gesture, a misplaced sentence, an object that returns, a silence between two characters: each can become narrative information. The writer decides what to keep and what to remove so that a scene can say more than it explains.
There is also a difference that must be protected. A patient is not a character. Clinical intimacy is not narrative material that is simply available for use. Responsible writing requires a clear boundary between the experience of observing human beings over many years and the appropriation of stories that do not belong to us.
What can travel from one discipline to the other is a form of attention. The patience not to decide too early. Suspicion toward explanations that arrive too easily. An interest in identity and in what can change while remaining recognisable.
In my medical books, that attention is organised as diagnosis. In the novels it appears as tension, gaze, secrecy, memory or consequence. They are not the same activity. But perhaps they begin with the same discomfort with surfaces: the sense that seeing something does not yet mean understanding it.