A new book by a pediatric neurosurgeon attests to the importance of narrative in medicine—of telling stories as a human once the doctor’s work is done.
” . Wellons is the chief of pediatric neurosurgery at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Nashville, and has begun to write, as I did, after some twenty years in medicine.
Wellons’s journey into medicine was influenced by his father, who had wanted to be a doctor, but whose family couldn’t afford the training. Instead, he became a businessman, and his early ambitions were transferred to his son. Then, just as the younger Wellons was graduating from medical school, his father received a diagnosis of the neurodegenerative disease A.L.S.
In Richard Selzer’s short story “Imelda,” an American plastic surgeon named Hugh Franciscus, a cold and imperious perfectionist, goes on a charity mission to Honduras. There he prepares to operate on a young girl, Imelda, with a cleft palate. But Imelda suffers a complication from anesthesia, dying before Franciscus even makes an incision. That night, he sneaks into the hospital morgue and performs the planned surgery on Imelda’s corpse, so that her mother can bury a repaired child.
Wellons’s healthy sense of his limitations includes an understanding that such limitations will never be easy to accept. One of the most surreal stories in the book recounts a fetal surgery that, after the placenta detaches from the uterine wall, turns into the emergency delivery of a baby girl, three months premature. A “wall of blood” suddenly blocks the view through Wellons’s microsurgical loupe.
Wellons understandably wonders about KJ’s future, what kind of life he’ll lead, what job he might have. But if he wonders about the events that brought him to the operating room, he does not share this with us. Perhaps he didn’t get the details in the understandable rush to the O.R., but the reader pauses nonetheless, because KJ is clearly a victim of the relentless problem of gun violence in America.
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