Richard Rapport, a gifted writer who is also a neurosurgeon, recently sent me a reading list of books he’d compiled for the brain-surgeons-in-training whom he oversees.  Brilliant as his students are, few have the luxury of being well-read.  He writes “today’s undergraduates are educated narrowly to be competitive in the professions, and medical students and residents have little time to read anything other than what is directly applicable to their training.”  Nevertheless, he believes it’s critical that physicians be something more than highly skilled technicians, and so follows his list of books by writers who “have seen into human beings far more clearly and deeply than a CT scan or an MRI.”

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams

Doctor Stories, William Carlos Williams

Madame Bovary, Flaubert

Open Secrets, Alice Munro

The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald

The Collected Storied of Frank O’Conner

Catch 22, Joseph Heller

Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow

Ward # 6, Chekhov (a novella)

Fathers and Sons, Turgenev

Pnin, Nabokov

The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams

Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle

Civilization and its Discontents, Freud

Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky

War and Peace, Tolstoy

What would be on your list of books that you wish were on your physician’s bedside table? Books that inform bedside manner, books that remind us what it is to be human?

Finally, I’ll leave you with an illustration that made me laugh. Publishing may not be brain surgery, but folks in the book business do have time to read. True, it’s more e-mail than Aristotle, but still…