The Call of Stories by Robert Coles

Author:Robert Coles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

5

Vocational Choices and Hazards

WE WERE A GROUP of medical students who met once a week to discuss a short story or a poem we’d all read. The meetings were a break from the sheer drudgery of the first and second years of endless facts, memorized and all too often forgotten so that new information could in turn be (at least for a time) absorbed. We decided one spring to ask a physician who lived not far away to come give a talk at our school. We thought we ought to check with the dean’s office, perhaps get the dean to issue an invitation on behalf of the entire medical school. We went to see the dean; he listened to our request and asked how “the second year” was going. We told him we weren’t exactly traveling on easy street. He asked what was giving us trouble. The more we talked, the less he liked hearing us. We should stop complaining, he told us, and get on with the job of finishing up the year. Once we got to the third year, things would change, would be more to our liking. We’d see patients; we’d be learning through doing, not just cramming in pathology or pharmacology.

We nodded as he talked, half agreeing, half cowed by authority. After a while, though, we came back to our starting point and purpose. How about an invitation to William Carlos Williams, M.D.—that he come and read some of his poems, perhaps, or some of the stories he wrote about his medical practice? The dean told us he would be glad to oblige, though he also reminded us that we had just told him how little time we had for anything other than our classes, our laboratory work, our evening studying. Perhaps we might think of delaying the invitation? When would be a suitable time? one of us asked, a bit testily. The point was to learn from an interesting and gifted writing doctor, even as we were learning from other doctors in the medical center. Finally the dean summoned his secretary and dictated to her the briefest and coldest of invitations. Was there anything else he might do for us? The question was meant to get a rise out of us, literally, and it succeeded: we got up, said hasty good-byes, and left with our heads angrily lowered.

We wrote to Dr. Williams, though, and he telephoned that he’d be glad for us to visit him, or he’d come and visit our group, but he felt uncomfortable about coming on a formal visit to our “big shot medical center.” He didn’t think he had much to say to us. “To be honest, I’m scared.” Why? “I’m a G.P. out here in Paterson and I don’t know a thing about academic medicine. Hell, I never went to college, and I squeaked through medical school, and I’ve been on the firing line ever since—up and down those stairs making house calls.” When we tried to remind him that it was his writing life that interested us, he was puzzled.

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