style with the effective depiction of illness narratives. He spent the
next 30 years practicing his art with gusto. Dr. Jerome Groopman,
a staff writer at the New Yorker, wrote in the New York Times that
Dr. Selzer “helped usher in the genre of medical writing in which
the physician puts his experience under the microscope for the lay
reader’s scrutiny.” He was a fantastic wordsmith and even a neologist. “I think my writing is antique, of the past, not of modern
tongue,” Dr. Selzer said. “The imagery is baroque, full of metaphors
and similes. It’s my way, and I couldn’t do it any other way.” He
was an amazingly deft stringer of words, a cobbler of phrases and
sentences. He took immense delight in putting them together. If he
couldn’t find the word in the dictionary that would best describe his
literary intention, he made it up. Some of his favorite “Selzerisms”
include “canimosity” (dislike of dogs), and “aqualune” (the path of
moonlight in water). “What has given me the greatest pleasure,” he
writes in “Diary,” “is not love but writing: gathering up the words
I find lying all over like leaves, seedlings, feathers, pebbles. I brush
them off, set them down in a line just so, and wait for them to sing.
Sometimes after writing a sentence, I sit back, lick the cream from
my snout and purr. End of myself.” His writing style is unusually
daring, eccentric and lyrical and with large doses of profound humanity, charm and wisdom. His gift of writing is brilliant, intensely
likable and intellectually satisfying.
Allen Richard Selzer was born on June 24, 1928 in Troy, New York,
the second son of Dr. Julius Louis Selzer, a general practitioner, and
a former singer, Gertrude Schneider. Julius Selzer ran his clinic from
the ground floor of his family home and Richard had gone on many
house-call trips with his father to attend to patients. He attended
Union College receiving a BS degree in 1948 and MD from Albany
Medical College in 1953. He then served in the Army for two years
as a lieutenant in charge of a medical detachment in South Korea.
After completing his surgical training at Yale, he commenced his
surgical practice in 1960 and started serving on the clinical faculty
at Yale. He retired as a surgeon in 1985 and continued his career as
a full-time writer. He was a permanent fixture at the Bass Library
at Yale Campus, and had been given a perpetual tenant status in a
carrel - a private hermitage - for his literary creative output, napping
and reading.
This celebrated surgeon-writer had churned out 16 books and
a multitude of essays and short stories over the years. Dr. Selzer’s
writing avocation commenced on publication of “Ritual of Surgery”- a compilation of short stories (1973) - and continued with
many others including his most famous “Mortal Lessons: Notes on
the Art of Surgery” (1976), “Confessions of a Knife” (1979), “Letters
to a Young Doctor” (1982), “Taking the World in for Repairs” (1986),
“Imagine a Woman” (five novellas, 1990), and two autobiographical
accounts :“Down from Troy-A Doctor Comes of Age” (1992) and
“Raising the Dead- A Doctor’s Encounter with his own Mortality”
(1993) and “Diary” (2010). His most recent semi-autobiographical
and fictionalized “Knife Song Korea” (2010) was published 55 years
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LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
after he had written the journals while serving in a remote village
in South Korea. Dr. Selzer published numerous essays in major
periodicals including Harper’s, Vanity Fair and Esquire and was the
recipient of many accolades and awards including a Guggenheim
Fellowship, a National Magazine award and an American Medical
Writer’s Award.
Dr. Selzer, through his prolific literary output, has contributed
significantly in promoting bioethics and medical humanities in
a large majority of United States medical schools’ curricula. “If I
hadn’t become a doctor and writer, I think that I would have had
an early death, after a short and unhappy life. It was the combined
power of medicine and literature that saved me for what was to
be my destiny,” Richard Selzer said to his biographer, Dr. Mahala
Yates Stripling. Dr. Stripling has conducted many interviews with
late Dr. Selzer over many years; her last one was on June 2, 2016
-- two weeks before he passed away. He donated his body to the
Yale School of Medicine.
May his soul rest in peace!
Dr. Seyal practices cardiovascular diseases with Floyd Memorial
Medical Group-River Cities Cardiology.