May 31, 2025
I am very honored to be here with my sister Angie and brother-in-law Olly on this august occasion and to have the opportunity to say a few words. It’s wonderful to be able to flit down here to Australia and be an instant VIP, an instant rock star, and be able to bathe in the reflected glory of our great aunt Henry Handel Richardson – HHR as she was always known.
I’m not really the person to give you any profound insights into the family, or reflections on HHR’s writings. Rather I have an interest in how a writer comes to be. Where do the compulsion and the skills come from? How is it that some people have the ability? In particular, I have an interest in doctors as writers. This is probably because I’m a doctor myself. Nothing too exotic. Not a neurosurgeon. Not an interventional cardiologist. Just a general practitioner – or Family Physician as it’s called in the US as I found out when I was enticed there by a woman who didn’t want to live in England
The tendency to practice medicine seems to run in the family. I come from a bit of a dynasty of doctors. Our dad kept telling me I’d be the fourth generation of doctors. Maybe it’s a bit overblown to call it a dynasty but, our dad was a doctor. our grandfather, Otto was a doctor, our great grandfather was a doctor – and was of course Walter Lindesay Richardson, father of Henry Handel Richardson.
This makes me think there is something in the family genome – that tiny, folded smidgin of proteins that is our DNA, that determines our every characteristic. It seems in our family that predisposes to doctoring – which I always describe as a genetic disease. But, I wonder if there isn’t another “genetic disease” embedded in our genome, a gene or two that codes for a compulsion to write? Our mother had pretensions to write. She was getting started on a biography of our grandmother – Lillian Lindesay Richardson, Henry’s sister, and their relationship – but died of breast cancer before she could get it done. Now as Angie told you, she has taken on that quest. It also seems there were maybe writing genes in our mother’s family, having a cousin who wrote leaders for the London Times. Angie of course is a writer. She has made her living from writing.
But the writing gene seems to have become manifest in the doctors of the dynasty. Walter was, in the words of Bruce Steele, ‘a writer of force and distinction.’ He wrote on medical topics, published medical papers, mostly on midwifery, but also ‘Letters from Home’ on a trip to England in the Australian Medical Journal. He also wrote letters in Melbourne and Ballarat newspapers. Much of his writing and speaking was on what seems to have been a bit of an obsession of his – the practice of spiritualism.
Grandfather Otto had a particular interest in, and wrote about, hygiene and medical aspects of ancient religious texts in art, sometimes getting into esoteric and dare I say it, slightly wacky stuff. Like Emerods in the Book of Samuel – how the Philistines appeared to sufferer a “plague of emerods” that smote the people of Ashod “in their secret parts” in retribution for stealing the Ark of the Covenant. “Emrods” seem to be what we now call hemorrhoids. I have to say I have never seen an epidemic of hemorrhoids. The idea is a little strange. Then our father wrote several books on his specialty of forensic psychiatry, the best known being The Mind of the Murderer.
The combination of doctors as writers is not so unusual, however. Think of Somerset Maugham, Oliver Sacks, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Osler, William Carlos Williams, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Atul Gawande, Deepak Chopra. All are that hybrid of doctor/writer. But there also seem to be doctor/writers closer to home – Colleen McCullough, author of The Thornbirds and The Ladies of Missalonghi; Leah Kaminsky, author of Dolls Eyes and The Hollow Bones; Jacinta Halloran, author of Dissection and Pilgrimage. They are all doctor/writers – but Australian ones.
One of the best-known doctor/writers who I haven’t mentioned is Anton Chekov. I have been reading some of his short stories recently and am captivated. I particularly love the way he expresses his compulsion to write thus: “medicine is my lawful wedded wife, and literature is my mistress.”
A good question is – why should there be so many doctor/writers? English novelist, and doctor, Phil Whitaker, writing in The Guardian provides some insight. Doctoring gives “a ringside seat during every one of life’s landmarks – pregnancy, birth, childhood, marriage, divorce, employment, redundancy, illness, ageing, bereavement, death,” he notes.
Also having to repeatedly make case presentations on rounds teaches the ability to tell a story. Somerset Maugham was in no doubt. “I do not know of any better training for the writer’s profession than that of spending time in medicine” was his comment.
As a bit of an aside, I’m tempted to comment on how not everything written by doctor’s is wonderful. If you’ve ever tried reading medical journals you will be aware of the authors propensity to gobbledygook. I have tried to make a study of this. What about “the need for an epistemological paradigm that helps trainees develop a tolerance for imperfection in self and others; and acceptance of shared emotional vulnerability and suffering while simultaneously honoring the existence of difference”? – this in a paper about training doctors to have empathy.
Another flaw in medical writing is the love of jargon and abbreviations -ADHD, PMS, PMDD, LOL, PTSD, COPD, BPH, PUD, DOA, CVS, HTN * – the list is endless. I find it hard not to believe sometimes this is a deliberate obfuscation and a way to make the doctor feel superior. There are also some colorful – if somewhat derogatory – medical terms, several introduced by a satirical book, The House of God, about the horrors of residency in America – a book everyone was reading when I had to do residency to get a license to practice in the US. This has terms like GOMER – standing for “get out of my emergency room”- meaning a patient who is such a train wreck that you would rather they were treated elsewhere. The term horrendoma is another term meaning a disaster of a patient. “Frequent flyer” – meaning a patient who shows up too often. DRT for “dead right there” – a patient who can’t be resuscitated. And less derogatory perhaps “a fascinoma” meaning some, usually arcane medical condition or pathology that the academics get in a lather about.
But to return to my theme of questioning if there is some genetic predisposition to writing I looked for evidence that writing skill is something that is inherited in the literature. Could it be that Angie and I have inherited some of HHR’s genes? Nice idea. It seems we have both inherited the compulsion to write at least. I couldn’t find much information about this being genetically inherited. An article in the on-line reading platform Medium says “Some people believe that there is a genetic component to writing ability. This is supported by the fact that some families seem to have a natural talent for writing. For example, the Brontë sisters, all of whom were talented writers.”
There are other characteristics that likely are determined by inheritance that are liable to have an influence on whether a person has the ability to write. Things like intellect, language skills, and creativity. Another prerequisite I found people talked about as necessary to being a good writer is what experiences that person has had. But there still seems to some “secret sauce” that makes a great writer.
We all have access to the same lexicon. To all the same words. But what is it about a good writer that they can arrange them in a way that conveys emotion, and holds our attention?
I have just been re-reading The Getting of Wisdom so that I could remind myself of what HHR had to say about PLC – which I gather ruffled a few feathers at the time. This has prompted me to ask how it is that HHR, like other great writers, can pick on just the right features of someone’s appearance, speech, behavior to make us understand the person perfectly, feel their emotion, be involved, hold us spellbound?
As I say, I’m a doctor not a writer and not sure I can answer this question, so will not ramble on trying to do so. I will be respectful of the maxim of another great writer, George Eliot who says: “Blessed is the man who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact”.
*I did not tell what these abbreviations stand for during the talk but for those who are just dying to know they are:
- ADHD – attention deficit disorder
- PMS – premenstrual syndrome
- PMDD – premenstrual dysphoric disorder (has been used as a defense for murder!)
- LOL – little old lady
- PTSD – post traumatic stress disorder
- COPD – chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
- BPH – benign prostatic hyperplasia
- PUD – peptic ulcer disease
- DOA – dead on arrival
- CVS – cardiovascular system
- HTN- hypertension