When Doctors Get Sick

Storytelling has gained prominence in medicine, where the tales of the sick are medicalized as “pathography.” Interest in “narrative,” as it is called in academic circles, is equally widespread in history, where stories based on facts and re-created with imagination bring other times to life more dramatically than the dry data of economics and biography. If we physicians read more accounts of our patients' travails and, better still, talked about them with each other, we might improve the humane qualities of medical care. The chiaroscuro of conversation and narrative can so highlight the social, emotional, and economic origins of many complaints that it might even help to make medical practice more cost-effective.

We review here what the two of us learned from the stories about sick doctors that we collected a decade ago [1]. These narratives illuminate the dilemma of impaired physicians-or wounded healers, as they have been called-that our profession must examine before others do it for us.

Being seriously ill or disabled gives doctors a foretaste of retirement and the leisure for reveries that their duties have taken from them; it makes them contemplate even their own death. The stories of sick doctors force emotion back into medicine, and when sick doctors themselves learn the comfort that comes from attention and devotion, empathy cannot lag far behind. Practitioners of alternative medicine already know this, their popularity growing in part because they delight their patients with time and attention.

More than most people, sick doctors deny that they are sick. They may worry privately about their health, but the unconscious pact with the Creator that many physicians have made-we will take care of the sick and You will guarantee us good health-makes it hard for them to realize that they, too, are mortal. The hypochondriasis of medical school …