Vol. 2, Number 1	Spring 1999 issue

 

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About fourteen years ago, distinguished New Haven surgeon Richard Selzer took off his surgical smock for good and turned his focus from medicine to his other love, writing. The recently published Doctor Stories, a compilation of Selzer's best short stories from four of his books, affords us an opportunity to explore the mind of a kind, exacting physician whose twenty-five-year career as a surgeon took him from the jungles of South America to the streets of New Haven, scalpel in hand.

In the book's charmingly unpretentious introduction, Selzer describes how recently, while riding on the Yale Minibus, he realized that he had performed a skin graft on the bus driver when the man was a child many years before. "I remembered leaning over him, holding his hand, his struggle not to cry," Selzer writes. "Now, so many years later, I had an impulse to go up behind the bus driver to examine, to feel, to ask him to show me the donor site."

The process of probing the scars of our past is a central task of Doctor Stories. Whether framed as true reminiscences or fictional works, the stories enable Selzer to revisit the doctors, the families, and the pain that physical or psychological scars obscure. In surveying his 25 year career of healing, Selzer has developed an intuitive understanding of medicine that only the view from behind the surgical mask can provide. Years of dealing with organ transplants, for example, allowed him to write the heartwarming "Whither Thou Goest," in which a woman must find the recipient of her husband's donated heart to overcome the pain of his death.

Selzer actually watched other stories unfold on the operating table before his own eyes. "Imelda," for example, is based on the true story of Selzer's stoic mentor, an iron-faced surgeon who performed stunning plastic surgery on a cleft-lipped Honduran girl although the girl had died the night before under anesthesia.

In his overtly autobiographical stories, Selzer's strength and humility shine through. In "Mercy," Selzer relives his utter inability to end a patient's pain with a fatal dose of medicine. "Sarcophagus," too, is the reopening of a deep psychological wound-a death in surgery. Selzer's desperate, terrifying description of the discovery of a massive cancer in the stomach gives way to a chilling death and, subsequently, the news that he is loathe to deliver. The story closes in the silence of the abandoned operating room: "It is empty, dark...I close my eyes and see again the great pale body of the man, like a white bullock, bled. The line of stitches on his abdomen is a hieroglyph. Already the events of this night are hidden from me by these strange untranslatable markings." Selzer proves that in the end, the most significant scars are one's own.

A few of his pieces attempt the literary equivalent of reconstructive surgery, as Selzer attempts to deliver stories that before had remained unwritten. In "The mirror-tale of Aram," Selzer pens a story that James Joyce never got around to writing. "Poe's lighthouse" is a completion of a tale that Poe left unfinished when he died.

With powerful insight, Selzer puts meticulous care into his words. The images he creates avoid the inherent cheap shock value of gore, jolting the reader instead with startling figurative language. Here, imagining himself a Civil War medic in "Pages From a Wound Dresser's Diary," he demonstrates this uncanny combination of grace and precision: "I begin to dress a wound, a soupy crater in the flanks of a man too old by far to have fought in any war. 'A vulture would turn me down,' he says. He shakes with fever; I could light a match to his skin."

While such prose has earned Selzer worldwide acclaim, he may be one of Yale campus's best kept secrets, penning his stories each day in Sterling Library. After a childhood in Troy, New York, and a degree in medicine from Albany Medical College, Selzer came to New Haven in 1953 for surgical training, and except for a stint as a medic in Korea and Japan, has stayed ever since. While a full-time professor and surgeon in New Haven, Selzer wrote many stories in spare moments amidst a full schedule of operations and surgical classes.

Who knows whether Selzer's simple, elegant and honest stories will one day earn him a place among the greatest doctor-writers, whose ranks include William Carlos Williams, Anton Chekov, and John Keats. It is undeniable that whether grasping pen or scalpel, he can rest assured that his hand has, in one way or another, healed so many.