Not For Everyone

Here is a story that’s not for everyone. OK, truth to tell, it’s a story that’s only for a very select group: Writers, medical professionals, and writers who once were – or still are, medical professionals.  <You know:  People like me.  But I digress.> If you’re a writer or a medical professional – or if you know and care about someone who is, or once was – then read on.  And if not?  Hey, you get a free pass.  Stop reading this blog right now. Go outside and take a hike. Hell, go golfing for all I care.  But definitely get outside.  You been warned.

 

 

The current New Yorker has a book review about the recently published sequel to “House of God,” that famous satire about medical training written 40 years ago. The original contains words like “GOMER,” an acronym for “Get Out of My Emergency Room.” <This refers to elderly nursing home transfers you as a resident definitely don’t want on your neurosurgical service.>  It also contains timeless medical wisdom like the following:

 

The first procedure in any cardiac arrest?
Take your own pulse.

 

As the reviewer points out, “House of God” may have been an important book, but it was not great literature. Also, being satire, it was filled with uninhibited caricatures – racist, sexist, ageist – that make it cringe-worthy today. Oh, and also:  “Its ’70s sex was not safe.”  But hey, it sold over 2 million copies. And the 2003 edition had an intro written by John Updike.  That’s something at least, right?  Well, maybe… or maybe not.

The reviewer’s best points are not about the substance of this new sequel, which is titled “Man’s 4th Best Hospital.” They’re also not about the deeply flawed original, prescient as those points may be.  Instead, the best bits are about the writing process itself, and about human development generally. The reviewer is a pediatrician, after all.

 

Quoting at length:

 

As nostalgic as I may be for the time when I wrote like a child – blithe, mindless of consequence, the only audience in my mind an audience of people who already loved me – I am no longer a child. These days I write not only for my best friends, but for general readers. Growing up involves coming to realize that others are as human as oneself.  They have inner lives at least as rich as one’s own. The realization that others have inner lives is a developmental milestone we humans are supposed to achieve around age four.  But it turns out that many of us are still working on it decades later. Or perhaps we gain the ability to imagine the lives of others around age four, but we may – or may not – put that ability into practice.

I look to literature to attune my mind to the inner lives of other people.  It is painful when a book falls so short of deeply imagining the other that it portrays some whole wings of the world as flat, airless, not truly worth inhabiting. It is ironic, in a sick way, when the art that ought to bring us closer accidentally insists that some of us are not really worth the effort. I read “House of God” in medical school, as many of us do, and it left me looking askance at my chosen field.

 

You can say that again, sister.

 

I guess my own verdict on “House of God,” as well as my reaction to the de-humanization that comes part and parcel with the more destructive stresses of medical training, is that there are different ways we deal with life’s hard parts.  Some are surely more noble than others.  Satire as a genre no doubt appeals to our less evolved selves. <Age four sounds about right to me.>  But all of us carry around those earlier versions of ourselves wherever we go. Recognizing that fact – admitting it and dealing with it, both in ourselves and in others – is every bit as much a part of achieving adulthood as the empathy the reviewer (correctly) lauds, while still pointing out the serious flaws in this writing.  So I guess in response, I’d say this: It’s not Higher Criticism, fercryinoutloud. It’s satire.  Lighten up and take your own advice. You want Higher Criticism, there’s plenty of that out there to tickle yer fancy.

But hey, what do I know.  Maybe that’s just me?

Yep. My point exactly.

 

Last word goes to a very fine writer, Eudora Welty:

 

“What I do in writing any character is try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set most high.”