Adam Larson

Doctor Addicts or Wounded Healers? The “Impaired Physician” in the Short Fiction of Doctor-Writers

Adam Larson

Weill Cornell Medicine - Qatar

ahl2005@qatar-med.cornell.edu

Stories about physicians have a central place in the medical and health humanities. Doctors who write, like Anton Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Oliver Sacks, and more recently, Danielle Ofri, Perri Klass, and Atul Gawande, have first-hand experiences with medicine that enable them to offer rich accounts of doctors’ lives, their relationships with patients and colleagues, and the personal, professional, and moral challenges they face. In their chapter on physicians in literature, William Monroe and John L. Coulehan (2002) outline five common physician character types: (1) the physician as savior, (2) the physician as scientist, (3) the physician as detective, (4) the physician burnout, and (5) the impaired physician. This final character type, the “impaired physician,” merits greater attention in light of estimates that ten to fifteen percent of healthcare professionals engage in substance abuse at some point in their careers (Baldisseri, 2007). In this paper, I explore two short stories by doctor-writers about impaired physicians: Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Morphine” and Chris Adrian’s “A Better Angel.” Bulgakov’s narrative, first published in 1925 and included in the 1975 collection of his short fiction, A Country Doctor’s Notebook, tells the story of Sergei Polyakov, a young country doctor who narrates an unexpected descent into morphine addiction in a journal he leaves behind for his friend and colleague, Dr. Bomgard. Adrian’s story first appeared in a 2006 edition of The New Yorker and was later included in a collection of his short fiction, A Better Angel: Stories. It uses elements of magical realism to explore the strained relationship between an impaired pediatrician and his dying father. To analyze these narratives, I draw upon Arthur Frank’s typology of illness narratives, which include restitution, chaos, and quest narratives. While Frank’s typology aims to illuminate the narrative strategies patients use to make sense of their illnesses, I argue that it can also serve as a valuable framework for understanding the experiences and struggles of impaired physicians, who occupy a liminal space between caregiver and receiver. These narratives draw attention to doctors’ complex, often conflicted, inner lives and foster critical awareness of the challenges they face in seeking help.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Adam Larson is Assistant Professor for English as a Second Language at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, where he teaches in the Premedical Program. Dr. Larson received a Doctorate in Education from King’s College London, where his research involved the philosophy and sociology of education, a Master of Arts in International Studies from the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, a Bachelor of Arts in English and Linguistics from the University of Washington, and a Bachelor of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Dr. Larson has been awarded Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships in Arabic and Persian, and a Fulbright Fellowship to the Republic of Yemen, where he was a research affiliate of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies. Since coming to Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, he has researched how medical students choose medical specialties and how they perceive the role of medical research in their future careers. Dr. Larson’s current interests include the medical and health humanities, curriculum and pedagogy, and the philosophy of education.