Welcome to this week’s Health Voices. Today, we explore Why Do Doctors Write? Our host recounts the first “patient” he ever wrote about—a twelve-year-old boy on an autopsy table—and how a tiny bullet hole “carved such devastation.” He discovers that doctors have always told stories, but modern doctor-writers like Oliver Sacks showed him that medicine could reveal each patient’s unique narrative: “Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other,” Sacks wrote, “Historically, as narratives—we are each of us unique.”

Medicine supplies the facts, but writing brings inner worlds into view. Sherwin Selzer taught the host that “One holds the knife as one holds the bow of a cello,” transforming clinical technique into art. Through reflective writing, doctors grapple with grief, ethics, and the thin barrier between life and disaster. As the host puts it, writing became “perhaps the only way I had to care for him”—the boy on the table whose story stayed with him the longest. Thanks for listening to Health Voices—where every life in medicine finds its voice.
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