Writer and medical doctor Ethan Canin tried to bridge the gap between medicine and literature Tuesday afternoon, drawing on his own experience in both fields. Canin, a professor of fiction at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop, argued for a more humane field of medicine at the 13th annual Harriet W. Sheridan Literature and Medicine Lecture.
Canin's humorous and passionate lecture, "Oxidation of Squalene by Squalene Epoxidase to Form 2,3-Oxidosqualene, or How I Left Medicine for a Career in the Arts," urged doctors to think more like writers. Doctors should use real, everyday words to describe ailments, he said, as opposed to medical jargon, which he said creates a "scientification of medical suffering."
Medical terminology "seems to slow our thinking, keeps us one step removed," he added.
Canin, trained in medicine at Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Francisco, has spent his career as a fiction writer.
According to Peter Kramer, clinical professor of psychiatry and human behavior, "Canin wrote with such success that after training, he never practiced medicine."
Professor of Medicine Michael Stein described Canin as "a doctor of fiction."
Canin told the audience that when he began college at Stanford University, he was an engineering major with no interest in the humanities. "I'm taking physics and calculus, and to broaden myself, economics" was his philosophy at the time, he said.
However, a book of short stories by John Cheever he read as a first-year changed his life forever. "How can I tell you what that opening passage meant for me?" he said. "I read it and read it, wondering what words, just words, could do for me."
At that moment he knew he wanted to be a writer, he said.
During his subsequent experiences in postgraduate writing and medical training, Canin began to see the connections between the two fields. Both are ultimately about humanity and require empathy most of all, he said.
"If you're interested in writing, you're interested in the human condition," he told The Herald, adding that this interest makes for a good doctor.
However, he expressed regret that the medical field does not place a greater emphasis on the humanity of medicine. The technical language of the profession glosses over the suffering of patients and causes doctors to be less empathetic, he said.
"Words have images that go along with them. ... That's lost in medicine," he said. However, using the real words might sometimes be too painful, he added.
Canin also gave advice to aspiring writers. "Write one word a day, because the first word is the key," he said. He added that being a writer takes both talent and character, but talent is much more common.
Canin described his experience in medicine as providing both his inspiration and discipline as a writer. Invention for a writer relies on being able to imagine you are someone else, he said, adding that he obtained this ability from his experience in medicine.
The Sheridan Lectureship is an annual event, organized by the University's medical school. Founded in 1993 by Clinical Professor Emerita of Psychiatry and Human Behavior Lynn Epstein, it seeks to reconcile medicine and humanities by creating a forum for literary scholars who write about illness.
Epstein told The Herald that the goal of the lectureship is "to help people understand the illness experience." Literature does just that by "taking you outside yourself," she said.
The audience, which included many students of medicine and writing, was very receptive to the speech. "I thought it was fantastic, amazing," said Leslie Wei '05. "I love his attitude about writing, that it is hard."
Kramer concurred. "(The lecture) was remarkable ... (Canin) prepared something especially for the occasion," he said, predicting that the material for Tuesday's lecture would be publishable as an essay.
Students seemed struck by Canin's empathy. One student, Jenna Kanter '05, expressed regret that Canin did not stay in the medical profession, given his humane approach to medicine.
Canin said that if he were to return to the profession, he would like to be on the admission committee of a medical school, so he could pick humane and empathetic medical students.
