IN MEMORIAM
DR. RICHARD SELZER - AN
INNOVATIVE PHYSICIAN-WRITER
(1928-2016)
M. Saleem Seyal, MD, FACC, FACP
“(I write) to domesticate my terrors… I do it to ward off disease, fend off death, to give pain a name.
I think I should have died at the age of forty if I had not begun to write.
For me to write is to transform all of my helplessness and despair as a surgeon into an affirmative act of creation.”
Richard Selzer and the Rhetoric of Surgery by Charles M. Anderson. Southern Illinois University Press, 1989
“The surgeon cuts his patient, and his own flesh must not bleed. He, like his patient, is anesthetized.
Only the writer is awake, and listening.”
“To a Would-Be Doctor-Writer,” Literature and Medicine 1 (1982):59 by Richard Selzer
I
t is coincidental that I was in the middle of
reading Richard Selzer’s “Diary of an Infidel”
in his compilation of essays entitled “ Taking
the World in for Repair” when I received an
e-mail from Dr. Mahala Yates Stripling informing me of Dr. Selzer’s death on June 15,
2016 in North Branford, Conn. Dr. Stripling
is a scholar working independently, who is a
biographer of Dr. Richard Selzer (her book
entitled “Doctor of Arts: The Life of Richard Selzer, M.D., the man
who transformed literature and medicine” is forthcoming). “Diary
of an Infidel” deals with his unintended sojourn in a monastery in
Italy outside Venice, where he resided in the company of monks
in very austere surroundings for several interesting, if regimented,
months. He went to Italy to write unhindered but checked himself
out of the Rockefeller Bellagio retreat after finding it to be insufficient for his literary output.
The world has lost a prolific and innovative surgeon-turned-writer.
He was 87 years old at the time of his death and has left us with 16
books and a multitude of essays, stories and memoirs. He substituted
his mighty scalpel with his mightier pen and transformed himself at
the age of 58 when he completely walked away from his Yale surgical
practice to become a committed writer of medical stories, essays and
medical narratology. “Richard Selzer was among the first modern day
physicians to understand the power of writing and reading fiction
within medicine,” writes Dr. Rita Charon of Columbia University.
Dr. Selzer arrived at the scene when the idea that humanities and
literature play a major role in medical education and ultimately in
medical practices started to germinate and flourish. In the early
1980s, he found a niche in his own amazingly beautiful writing
NOVEMBER 2016
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