Although reared on different academic diets, doctors and novelists have the same quality at heart: empathy. No one lacking this trait is going to excel at writing a novel or treating a patient, and anyone who has succeeded in doing both must have had it in droves – Dr Chekhov, for instance, who shows us how aligned literature and medicine are as humane pursuits concerned with understanding the condition of others. His classic novella Ward No 6 is about a doctor learning the value of empathy, that “to cultivate indifference to suffering is to aim at a living death”. That’s a lesson worth learning, whether you are writing fiction or prescriptions.
Tell Her Everything by the Kashmiri writer Mirza Waheed is about a doctor who betrays the principle of empathy. But it is through the empathic act of writing – of putting pen to paper and reckoning with those who have suffered at his hands – that he succeeds in recovering his humanity and coming back from his own living death.
