How Medicine Made Me a Reader

Suzanne Koven

I could begin by telling you that I was a lonely child who found solace in books—but I’d be lying. I was lonely, but I did not salve my loneliness by reading. I found inventing dramas for Barbie and Midge and snooping in my mother’s night table drawer—what was that unlabeled tube of goo?—much more interesting than Pippi Longstocking or Ramona. I was a competent enough reader according to the color-coded tests administered in the 1960s by the New York City public school system, and progressed from turquoise to silver along with the brighter kids in my class, but for the most part I remained unmoved by books. There were exceptions, particularly as I entered adolescence when I read, again and again, three predictable favorites: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Catcher in the Rye. Like so many kids, I saw myself in Francie Nolan, Scout Finch, and Holden Caulfield—but, to my shame, I still did not see myself as a reader.

In high school and college, as an English major, I became not so much a reader as a student of literature. I saw poetry and fiction as puzzles to be solved, tests to be aced. My paper-writing  technique was to find a theme, flip through the text to gather quotes related to that theme, and stick them together. “Eyes in The Great Gatsby,” by Suzanne Koven. I briefly considered a career in journalism but soon after graduation signed up to take chemistry and calculus and, being at the age when you believe you have to be one type of person or another, I decided I was the type of person who becomes a doctor, i.e. not the type of person who reads.

Then a funny thing happened. Freed of thinking of myself as a reader, I started to read. Between integrals and stoichiometry (I’m showing off: I have no idea what either of those are now and didn’t then) I had hours to kill sitting at the Roy Rogers franchise in the student center of the university where I was taking my required premed classes. My companion during those hours was Anna Karenina. Downing gallons of Diet Coke and more than a few burgers I found myself less drawn to the ill-fated Anna than to the plodding landowner, Levin. I particularly liked the passage where he joins laborers in scything a field. Levin is thoroughly enjoying the work, in “the flow,” as we now call it, until he starts thinking about what he is doing and his back begins to ache.

The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he felt the moments of unconsciousness in which it seemed not his hands that swung the scythe, but the scythe mowing of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own, and as though by magic, without thinking of it, the work turned out regular and well-finished of itself. These were the most blissful moments. It was only hard work when he had to break off the motion, which had become unconscious, and to think.

I didn’t fully understand it at the time but this passage articulated my own experience. When I thought too much I lost the joy in whatever I was doing whether working through chemistry problems, talking with friends, or, in fact, reading Anna Karenina. But Tolstoy had more than articulated my experience; he had anticipated it, even shaped it. A novel had moved me. Literally.

Fast forward many years during which I had small children and a growing medical practice. If Twitter or Netflix had existed then I would not have plowed so hungrily through Oprah’s Book Club selections, starved for entertainment and distraction. I considered myself in those years not so much a reader as a consumer of books, a book fan.

Then, a little over a decade ago, another funny thing happened. I was asked to facilitate a monthly literature and medicine discussion group at my hospital. For the first few years, we read books about doctors or patients: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, William Carlos Williams’s Doctor Stories. Talking about these texts at leisure after hours, the nurses, doctors, and other hospital staff in the group found permission to reflect on the deepest, most troubling, and most exhilarating aspects of our work. Gradually, we branched out to nonmedical texts (a full listing of which can be found here) and found Kafka’s Metamorphosis, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and the stories of Alice Munro no less relevant.

I am often asked how, exactly, reading poetry, fiction, and memoir benefits clinicians. There are countless articles about how reading increases empathy, decreases burnout or even makes you a nicer person. These may be true, but for me, reading—now that I am truly a reader—has a more profound effect: it effaces the boundaries between my personal and professional selves, between me and my colleagues, me and my patients. When I’m doing it right, reading makes me feel more fully human, able, even if only for a few moments, to scythe my field with joy. 

Suzanne Koven, MD (@SuzanneKovenMD) has practiced primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for over 25 years. In 2019 she was named inaugural Writer in Residence at Mass General. Her essays, articles, blogs, and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, The New Yorker.com, Psychology Today, The L.A. Review of Books, The Virginia Quarterly, STAT, and other publications. She conducts workshops, moderates panel discussions, and speaks to a variety of audiences about literature and medicine, narrative and storytelling in medicine, women’s health, mental healthcare, and primary care.