I'm Not a Doctor, I'm a Writer Quiz

Answer: Anton Chekhov

Chekhov went on to say: "When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other." Chekhov began work as a doctor in 1884, often treating the poor for free.

He might be the first writer to tackle that favorite theme of TV medical melodramas (and cop dramas too): the grizzled veteran warning rookies that their business that will totally desensitize them to misery. "People who have an official, professional relationship to other men's sufferings, for instance - judges, police officers, doctors - in course of time, grow so callous, that they cannot, even if they wish it, take any but a formal attitude to their clients" - or so claims his doctor protagonist in "Ward No. 6."

The quote seems to be partially ironic, as part of Chekhov's own ability to write such vivid characters came from his practical interest in them. "Ward No. 6" chronicles a small town's suspicions about the doctor, who takes an "unreasonable" interest in the mental ward. The doctor eventually ends up imprisoned himself. Chekhov won't be the last doctor-writer to feel some existential dread about his profession.

Answer: Arthur Conan Doyle

Dr. Joseph Bell was an attendant to Queen Victoria and occasionally helped the police as a medical examiner (including on the Jack the Ripper case). Bell studied people's hands to deduce their jobs, discover symptoms in a patient's posture, and had a keen ear for accents.

One of Bell's proteges was a Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, an ophthalmic surgeon with a side-hustle writing detective stories. Doyle repeatedly insisted that everything in the "Sherlock Holmes" stories was a plausible deduction, because he'd seen Dr. Bell make deductions of exactly that kind.

Like Doyle, Holmes' sidekick Watson was a surgeon with experience as a wartime medic. Watson was designed to channel the reader's confusion and awe at Holmes' methods, so it's logical that Doyle would write a Watson whom he could easily empathize with. Some have wondered if Holmes and Watson may have mirrored the precocious Doyle's work under the brilliant Bell. Watson, after all, was not as useless as some remember him - his textbook knowledge of medicine played a crucial part in Sherlock's incredible reasoning.

Answer: "Blindsight"

Though he completed a medical degree at Harvard and worked as an ophthalmologist, Cook, like so many, chose writing instead. "I think of myself more as a doctor who writes, rather than a writer who happens to be a doctor." Many of his books are meant to spur his readers' interest in hot medical issues, like stem cells and genetic engineering, and his plots often cross from the hospital into crime, corruption, and conspiracy. Whether he does it for the purpose of exploitation, exposure, or just entertainment, it's worked out for him: over 40 novels to his name in total.

Cook is inarguably a master of titles that grab your interest - but they don't necessarily link up with the content. Blindsight, a real phenomenon where some blind people react to visual stimuli they can't "see," apparently is not at all related to the plot of Cook's "Blindsight." As best as I can tell, it's a pun - the story's twist involves black market cornea trading. Other books have straightforward titles, such as "Coma," where it turns out a series of coma patients were actually deliberately incapacitated, in order to enable... black market organ trading. The guy has a favorite ending, doesn't he?

Answer: Maimonides

It's true - Moses Maimonides grew up studying philosophy but had to play doctor to support his family. He was good at it, and Saladin sought his services. As seems to be a theme among doctor-writers, once a doctor, always a doctor. Maimonides worked himself to exhaustion, continuing an independent practice while also tending to Saladin and his heirs. He also penned works on asthma, hemorrhoids, poisons, and, for Saladin's successor, a holistic guide to help against depression.

His philosophical writings were similarly expansive. The fourteen books of his Mishneh Torah, designed to help interpret the law of the Torah, have close to the status of a holy text: there are rabbis who believe that wherever the Misneh Torah diverged from the Talmud, the Misneh Torah should be trusted as the superior interpretation. Quite an accomplishment for a guy with a day job.

Answer: An alien pathogen

The name Michael Crichton may make you think of dinos, great apes, or robots in the old West. Before all those later successes, Crichton's big break came with 1969's "The Andromeda Strain." The titular pathogen is a microbe located in the upper atmosphere that hitches a ride to Earth on a satellite; once here, it wipes out a small town except, mysteriously, two survivors.

The plague is a savvy one, mutating so quickly that it soon determines how to eat through its containment. Ominously, the book ends with the organism mutating to become benign (that's nice of it), but proliferating madly in the upper atmosphere - reaching a point where it can eat through rockets. "The Andromeda Strain" was published in May of 1969 - space flight and off-world microbes were top of people's minds on the eve of the first lunar landing.

Crichton would delve back into the medical numerous times, notably in film. He directed the adaptation of Robin Cook's "Coma" and created "ER," a medical drama praised for its realism.

Answer: Francois Rabelais

"Alcofribas Nasier" is an anagram of the author's real name, Francois Rabelais (he did identify himself after his books became popular). After taking holy orders, Rabelais abandoned them in 1530 to study medicine (he would be between 38 and 46 years old at the time!). It took him just four months to finish his course of study; from then on he mixed work as a physician with lectures on Hippocrates and Galen. Two years after earning his degree, he began writing his lengthy, satirical series of novels, "Gargantua and Pantagruel."

The OED defines "Rabelaisian" as "distinguished by exuberance of imagination and language combined with extravagance and coarseness of humor and satire." This either goes too far or not far enough: Rabelais relished in penning grotesque and funny depictions of every bodily function and fluid, informed by his special training in the subject.

But, though his books were censured by such authorities as the Sorbonne, they weren't actually intended as gross-out farces. They were sophisticated satires targeting an audience who would appreciate them. He saved his foulest excretions for his many intellectual nemeses: scholastics, pearl-clutchers, the unjustly pious, legalists, and self-indulgent intellectuals.

Answer: "Norby, the Mixed-Up Robot"

Set in a future where high-tech companions are the norm, Norby is a homebrew bot built from a mix of other robots, housed in a discarded can of Norb's Nails. The first thing Norby does, in fact, is violate Isaac Asimov's First Law of Robotics - "a robot may not injure a human being" - by knocking upside the head the mean shopkeeper who sells him. Norby and his new owner, Jeff, are a couple of outcasts who go on universe-saving adventures. Norby's mixing-up of the robot rules are a source of much comedy, but you get the sense he'd be a much less useful robot if he always checked his Ps and Qs.

The "Norby" books read like light adventure novellas, and they're witty enough to entertain adults today. Janet Asimov's familiarity with, and willingness to mock, the conventions of sci-fi is apparent (I'm sure Isaac got a kick out of it). Although Isaac Asimov is credited as a co-author, he always insisted that his name was only on the cover to sell more copies, and they were Janet's work. The books were popular enough to spawn a series of comics in "Boys' Life" magazine.

Answer: John Keats

In addition to meager work as a surgeon's assistant, John Keats had been orphaned by tuberculosis and served as a caretaker to his younger siblings. Sadly, it was from his siblings that he too caught the dreaded familial disease. Dead by age 26, his career is as impressive for the heights he achieved as the speed with which he achieved them. He wrote all six of the "Odes" that made him famous in the course of a single year.

A distinct medical-mindedness is obvious in Keats' poetry. Shortly before his death, he wrote his last poem, a fragment called "This living hand." It's a chilling meditation in which he foresees his cadaverous end:

"This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights..."

Answer: "Of Human Bondage"

All the answers are novels by Maugham, but "Of Human Bondage" is the one that draws closely on his personal life. The book's protagonist, Philip Carey, is an orphan whose mother died of tuberculosis, just like Maugham. The plot is driven by Carey's infatuation with Mildred, a troublesome woman who always seems to show up when she needs something, usually money... and he always gives it to her. We can consider this one of the book's diversions from biographical fact. Although he was lawfully married, Maugham maintained intimate relationships with several male secretaries all throughout his life.

Even though Maugham finished his studies, he never practiced professionally, and disliked medicine enough to make it the unhappy backdrop of "Bondage." On the upside, Maugham said the work did give him the opportunity to meet people at their lowest - powerful raw material for any novelist. "I learned pretty much everything I know about human nature in the 5 years I spent at St Thomas's Hospital."

Yet he happily made literature his full-time escape as soon as his novels began to sell. Philip Carey, meanwhile, wasn't so lucky.

Answer: "...a Hat"

"Agnosia" (Greek for "not knowing") refers to many neurological conditions where the sufferer fails to process what their senses are telling them. In a sense, ironically, it's like an antonym of blindsight. Often arising from brain injuries, agnosia can make it impossible to differentiate faces, words, or even objects. The poor chap from Sacks' title wandered around a sea of mystery things; when leaving Sacks' office, he tried wearing his wife's hand as he walked out.

Oliver Sacks was a practicing neurologist, and his books contain many anecdotes he experienced. There's a man who thinks his leg doesn't belong to him, a jazz drummer who uses Tourette's to fuel his improv, a grandmother whose syphilis turned her into a flirt. And that's just this book! The book also promoted awareness of savants - individuals with deficient mental capacities in some respects, but paradoxically exceptional ones elsewhere.

Sacks is among the few writers of nonfiction science lit to get a movie deal. His memoir "Awakenings" became a film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, while both "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" were also made into operas. Sacks privately acknowledged that parts of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" were exaggerated.