Science and Poetry, 2nd edition: William Carlos Williams’ The Doctor Stories

Many years ago I picked up a crumbling copy of The Doctor Stories at the Baltimore book festival. Fast forward six years and a cross-country move and it remained in its dilapidated state, unread. Its light weight, and the promise of a future blog post topic, induced me to bring it along on a recent vacation to Greece.

"William Carlos Williams passport photograph 1921" by Unknown - Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikipedia.

I was only familiar with William Carlos William (WCW), having read his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” in high school.

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

The poem was refreshing in its seeming simplicity, lack of abstraction, and briefness, especially in contrast to more European-style and traditionalist poets I was studying at the time. Still I didn’t give the poem much thought despite growing up in a farming community which was not so far removed from being dependent on the wheelbarrow (but more so the John Deere tracker).

I gained a greater appreciation for WCW’s work after reading The Doctor Stories, which were compiled by his protégé Robert Coyles. Not a protégé poet, but a physician; WCW made his living as a pediatrician in the rural town of Rutherford, New Jersey.

The book is composed mainly of short vignettes of WCW’s encounters with and observations about his patients. While I was hoping for more poetry inspired by medicine and science, the depictions of life and the state of medicine in the 1930s were fascinating.

WCW spent much of his time treating the working class, including immigrants. His writing is full of honesty and a mix of compassion and judgment towards his patients. He made many house calls, allowing him access to the most intimate moments of people’s lives. He would describe their houses, demeanor, and family dynamics in vivid detail.

The candid and unsentimental nature of his narratives is exemplified in one story, where WCW is trying to examine a child’s throat, suspecting diphtheria. But the child resisted and fought WCW, overpowering her father who was trying to restrain her.

I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her. My face was burning with it. The damned little brat must be protected against her own idiocy, one says to one’s self at such times. Others must be protected against her. It is a social necessity. And all these things are true. But a blind fury, a feeling of adult shame, bred of a longing for muscular release are the operatives. One goes on to the end. –pg 60.

His more sentimental side does come through in such stories as “Ancient Gentility” where he is called to see an old woman who lives in a remote and poor Italian immigrant community. He goes, knowing that they will be unable to pay him for his services. He describes meeting the husband:

He was wonderful. A gentle, kindly creature, big as the house itself, almost, with long pure white hair and big white moustache. Every movement he made showed a sort of ancient gentility. Finally he said a few words as if to let me know he was sorry he couldn’t talk English and pointed upstairs again.

He quickly examined the woman after it was clear she wasn’t sick and went back downstairs. The husband, in lieu of payment, offers him a small silver box.

Why snuff! Of course. I was delighted. As he whiffed the powder into one generous nostril and then the other, he handed the box back to me – in all, one of the most gracious, kindly proceedings I had ever taken part in.

Imitating him as best I could, I shared his snuff with him, and that was about the end of me for a moment or two. I couldn’t stop sneezing. I suppose I had gone at it a little too vigorously. Finally, with tears in my eyes, I felt the old man standing there, smiling, an experience the like of which I shall never, in all probability, have again in my life on this mundane sphere. –pg 101.

Mundane sphere? He is a friend of Ezra Pound and other poets who are meeting in cafes in Montmartre. But it appears that WCW found something rejuvenating in his medical work, writing:

“How do you do it? How can you carry on an active business like that and at the same time find time to write?” But they do not grasp that one occupation complements the other, that they are two parts of a whole, that it is not two jobs at all, that one rests the man when the other fatigues him. –pg 122. 

The book also delves into moral and ethical questions in medicine and the way doctors are held up as gods. In “Old Doc Rivers” he considers the case of a doctor who was an addict and a contradiction of coldness and kindness. But WCW is more interested in “What kind of doctor was he, really?” (–pg 16). WCW knew Rivers, having assisted him with several surgeries and even spending a summer in Rivers' home in his younger years.

Still he takes up the investigation without bias, visiting clinics Rivers worked at to examine medical records and talking with people who knew Rivers.

Although very talented at diagnosing patients and a steady and thorough surgeon, Rivers became sloppier with drugs and age. WCW’s wife asks, “If you know he is killing people, why do you doctors not get together and have his license taken away from him?”As to why no one ever did, WCW writes:

In reality, it was a population in despair, out of hand, out of discipline, driven about by each other blindly, believing in the miraculous, the drunken, as it may be. Here was, to many, though they are diminishing fast, something before which they could worship, a local shrine, all there was left, a measure of the poverty which surrounded them. They believed in him: Rivers, drunk or sober. It is a plaintive, failing story. –pg 40.

There are also the sought after poems about medicine, which, when I finally came upon them towards the end of the book, were somehow unsatisfying. I wanted to know more about the characters in the poems and craved the detail abundant in the previous narratives. An exception is “A Cold Front:”

            This woman with a dead face

            has seven foster children

            and a new baby of her own in

            spite of that. She wants pills

            for an abortion and says,

            Un hum, in reply to me while

            her blanketed infact makes

            unrelated grunts of salutation.

            She looks at me with her mouth

            open and blinks her expressionless

            carved eyes, like a cat

            on a limb too tired to go higher

            from its tormentors. And still

            the baby chortles in its spit

            and there is a dull flush

            almost of beauty to the woman’s face

            as she says, looking at me

            quietly, I won’t have any more.

            In a case like this I know

            quick action is the main thing.

The double entendre “A Cold Front” both refers to the weather, which WCW had to trudge through to get to his patients, and to the demeanor of his patient, with her “expressionless carved eyes.” It is also a commentary on how society perceives women who have abortions or don’t show the proper maternal instincts. But WCW seems to be sympathetic to the woman’s situation and the lack of choice and agency women possessed over their lives.

Still, “I won’t have any more” is a declaration, despite the fact it is the doctors choice as to whether to give her the pills, abortion being illegal at the time. WCW implies that not doing so would be a death sentence, referring to the woman as a cat too tired to escape her tormentors and referring to her face as dead in the first line.

The stories are generally funny with feisty patients, but at times can be graphic in its detail or heartbreaking in its misery. I would recommend The Doctor Stories to anyone interested in the history of medicine or wanting to know more about William Carlos William’s life.