In recent decades studies based on questionnaires and interviews have concluded that when doctors become ill they face significant barriers to seeking help. Several reasons have been proposed, primarily the notion that doctors' work environment predisposes them to an inappropriate help-seeking behaviour. In this article, the idea of the ill physician as a paradox in a medical drama is examined. Through a text-interpretive and comparative approach to historical illness narratives written by doctors suffering from one specific diagnosis, namely opioid addiction, the complex set of considerations guiding their behaviour as patients are to some extent revealed. The article concludes that, in the identity transition necessary to become a patient, doctors are held back by their professional status and that every step to assist them needs to take shape based on an awareness of the underlying principles of the medical drama. Written illness narratives by doctors, such as those highlighted in this article, might serve as a tool to increase such awareness.
A number of studies show that when doctors become ill, there is often ambiguity in the division of roles and responsibilities in the medical encounter. Yet little is known about how the dilemma of the sick doctor has changed over time. This article explores the experience of illness among physicians by applying an historical, narratological approach to three doctor's narratives about personal cases of cardiac disease: Max Pinner's from the 1940s, Robert Seaver's from the 1980s, and John Mulligan's from 2015. Drawing on Erving Goffman's principles of social interaction, I argue that part of the challenge in the analysed narratives is because when doctors seek medical attention for themselves, the ensuing medical 'drama' suffers. I compare the three narratives to argue that the experience of becoming a patient while simultaneously remaining a doctor is a challenge that has changed over time. In Pinner's narrative, the patient identity is both undesirable and inaccessible; in Seaver's, role ambivalence between doctor and patient is the most salient feature; for Mulligan, his personal rather than professional experience of illness is the overarching theme of the narrative. Finally, I suggest that an awareness of how the medical drama often changes when doctors are patients might prove beneficial both for the doctor-patients and providers of medical care.
Several physicians have been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature, but so far none of them have received it. Because physicians as women and men of letters have been a major topic of feuilletons, seminars and books for many years, questions arise to what extent medicine was a topic in the proposals for the Nobel Prize and in the Nobel jury evaluations: how were the nominees enacted (or not) as physicians, and why were none of them awarded? Drawing on nomination letters and evaluations by the Nobel committee for literature collected in the archive of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, this article offers a first overview of nominated physician-author candidates. The focus is on the Austrian historian of medicine Max Neuburger (1868–1955), the German novelist Hans Carossa (1878–1956), and the German poet Gottfried Benn (1886–1956), but it also briefly takes further physician-author nominees into account such as Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965). The article is part of an interdisciplinary medical humanities project that analyses nominations and committee reports for physicians and natural scientists nominated for the Nobel Prize from 1901 to 1970.
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