Patient's Progress

I have a tendency to mentally classify medical practitioners into Healers' or Doctors'. The latter being those, who look at their patients very superficially and treat the most obvious symptoms, and not caring enough to go to the root cause of the affliction. My maternal uncle, a very popular General Physician was the first healer' I knew as a child. By the grace of God, all the GPs our family has had till the current one have all been healers. I have a theory, that every healer is a potential novelist. For it's the healer, who knows all the sub-texts of a patient's disease: the relationships and equations he has with himself, his family and the rest of the world. His dreams and his desires, his inner pining and the ghosts that haunt him! For a healer, his patient is an open book a novel waiting to be written. It is therefore not surprising, that some great doctors have also been great writers, poets and novelists. The names that readily came to my mind, as my favorite novelists are Somerset Maugham and A.J. Cronin. But just one glance at Physician Writers' in Wikipedia shows a mind boggling list - right from antiquity to the 20th century. Oliver Goldsmith (18th century): I studied him in school, but never knew that he was a doctor. Then how about the creator of the legendary Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! Apart from these my favorite-doctor novelist was one, George Sava.

George Sava was a Romanian plastic surgeon, living in exile in London. He was intrigued as to why his patients wanted some detail of their face or the entire face changed. Each patient of his became a protagonist of his novel, real identities being duly fictionalized. I wonder how he managed to balance his life as a busy and popular surgeon and an equally popular novelist. Novel after novel just tumbled out! Among all the writers I have read, he was the most awarded and internationally honored person: as a surgeon, a novelist and a political activist! Sadly his autobiography, The Healing Knife A Surgeon's Destiny' is out of print. In this book, he also narrates what expectations a patient has vis-vis his doctor, his family, friends and colleagues. The fulfillments of these expectations are as important for the patient's recovery, as the treatment the doctor prescribes. He has traced these cultural attributes, right from the different tribes all over in the world to today's developed societies. And the differences are most revealing once again, it's

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