The New Yorker & Me: Jerome Groopman's "The Scalpel and the Pen"

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Jerome Groopman's "The Scalpel and the Pen"

Jerome Groopman (Illustration by Joe Clardiello)

Jerome Groopman, in his recent “The Scalpel and the Pen” (The New Yorker, July 25, 2022), claims that storytelling is part of being a good doctor. He says, “By writing stories, we as doctors aim to teach others about our patients while learning about ourselves.” This statement seems innocuous enough, yet I find myself balking at it. Why? It’s that vexed word “stories.” It smacks of fiction, of narrative purposely shaped to convey message or moral. Is that what Groopman means? If so, I disagree. Why fabricate? Why not just say what actually happens?

A few years ago, Groopman wrote a great review, “When Doctors Admit They Went Wrong” (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2014), in which he faulted Terrance Holt for writing medical “parables.” He says of Holt’s work,

His stories, though, do not recount recollections of exact events. Rather, Holt offers what he terms “parables.” The patients are not really individuals whom he cared for, but rather composites.

He further says,

I was taken aback by Holt’s assertion that only the form of parable can “capture the essence of something too complex to be understood any other way.” Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is an illuminating parable, as are the medical tales of Chekhov, Turgenev, and Kafka. But the nonfiction stories of Oliver Sacks, Robert Coles, Richard Selzer, and Sherwin Nuland, as well as potent new voices of young doctors like Danielle Ofri, Leah Kaminsky, and Christine Montross, certainly capture the essence and complexity of the clinical world.

I agree. If you want to “capture the essence and complexity of the clinical world,” or any world for that matter, write fact not fiction.