The Physician as Writer

Abstract

If volume 3 of the altogether excellent journal Literature and Medicine does nothing more than formally introduce to the American reading public the work and personality of the Welsh doctor/poet Dannie Abse, it will have distinguished itself. Dr Abse is the foremost of that thin red line of living writers who happen also to be physicians. Not that the condition of physicianhood is required of one who would write of the events of the human body; but it does offer a certain perspective grounded in a specific body of knowledge. Dannie Abse has again and again proved his ability to filter the facts of medical experience through his imagination and transform them into truths. In this collection, his gift is first exhibited in two poems relating to his mother and to his own conflict in probing the mysteries that will confirm for him her illness and impending death. I am...