June 26th, 2024
IS THE DOCTOR IN, OR IS THE DOCTOR WRITING POETRY? A book review by Jim Vogele
THE DOCTOR STORIES by William Carlos Williams compiled by Robert Coles (Publisher: New Directions Books) 1962, Williams; 1984 Introduction, Coles, ISBN 978-0-8112-0926-7
INTRODUCTION
I first read the poetry of William Carlos Williams in a Modern Poetry course during college. His poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” was a perfect introduction to literary criticism and interpretation. While I am a physician contract attorney and not a copyright attorney, I can safely say that the poem is now in the public domain as of last year, 2023, given that it has been 60 years since the end of the author’s life (Williams passed away in 1963). Thus, here is “The Red Wheelbarrow,” in its entirety:
“So much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.”
Interestingly, Williams first published this poem without a title; it appeared simply as XXII in the 1923 book, “Spring and All,” a collection of various writings by Williams.
Pretty simple poem, right? But what does it mean? Why does “so much” depend upon this “red wheel barrow,” which happens to be “glazed with rain water” and which sits “beside the white chickens”?
As a college student, I realized that what the poem ‘means’ is both something and perhaps unknowable. Still, I felt that if I focused with sufficient intensity upon the text, the meaning would pour forth. But rather than the poem opening like a blossoming flower, I eventually concluded that the inscrutability was the meaning. (The preceding metaphor provides evidence supporting my choice of a career in law over poetry). In any event, what specifically depends upon the red wheel barrow is left to the reader’s imagination. Perhaps the red wheel barrow is used around the farm; perhaps the painterly image the poem evokes is the point; and maybe the poem doesn’t mean anything. It isn’t a stretch to conclude that the poem encapsulates ambiguity, even though we can reasonably speculate that the poem conveys a feeling that the author experienced, whether literally – seeing an actual wheel barrow and real chickens – or in his imagination. All these years later, the poem still moves me even though I cannot say exactly why.
Such ambiguity can be the source of great beauty and powerful emotion in poetry. But it decidedly is not what one is looking for in a physician employment contract!
This physician contract review website is intended to provide the occasional insight concerning Montana, California, Oregon, and Washington physician contracts. Hence, a contract drafting (and interpretation) lesson: Ambiguity is a tool in the poet’s literary quiver, but it is not useful in a physician employment contract – certainly it is not useful in most cases from the physician’s standpoint. In rare instances, if there is a potentially favorable ambiguity in a contract it may fall into the ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ category of contract provisions. The ‘sleeping dogs’ theory of ambiguity is not exactly a legal term yet most of us know what this canine colloquialism means. And as for the actual legal terminology, I have written elsewhere in this website about contra proferentem
I will return a bit later to more about ambiguity and physician employment contracts, after sharing a few observations about THE DOCTOR STORIES. For not only was William Carlos Williams a poet and practicing physician – but he was also a short story writer!
THE BOOK
I was enthusiastic when it came time to read the medical short stories of William Carlos Williams. Here was an opportunity to read a physician-poet whose work I first encountered decades ago.
How went the experience of reading the short stories of physician-poet W.C. Williams, M.D.?
I wanted to love them, primarily because his poetry was meaningful to me during my formative years as an English Literature major. But my honest impressions upon reading the medical short stories of William Carlos Williams are a mixed bag.
The first thing I noted was that the stories were, “Compiled by Robert Coles”; this would be the same Robert Coles, M.D. who was a Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Coles taught various courses at Harvard University, including, for a time, a course called, “Dickens and the Law” at Harvard Law School. I attempted to enroll in this course when I attended Harvard Law, but it was a small seminar and in great demand and, hence, I did not get into the course. Nonetheless, the prevalence of the law and lawyers in the work of Dickens – most famously, of course, in the masterpiece, BLEAK HOUSE – is widely recognized. I did eventually read BLEAK HOUSE many years after I graduated from law school, but I was not fortunate to experience a course taught by Robert Coles.
In the introduction to THE DOCTOR STORIES, Coles describes how he met William Carlos Williams and explains the effect that doing so had upon Coles’s career. For Coles, as mentioned, had a widely-varied career as a physician, scholar, educator and author (of over 80 books!). Coles viewed Williams as a mentor and, with time, as a friend. Williams worked as a family doctor and in pediatrics. Coles chose pediatrics as his initial practice area, ultimately focusing on child psychiatry.
As for the stories, well, they do speak for themselves. But Robert Coles also speaks for them. As I was searching for something to say about these blunt tales, many containing moments of unflattering observations – by which I mean unflattering to the author Williams, as well as to some of the physician and patient characters featured in the stories. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “People do not seem to realize their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.” I think this overlaps with exactly what Coles was saying about the Williams short stories, praiseworthy as they may be for the bracing and sometimes uncomfortable honesty with which Williams told his tales set in the medical profession. Robert Coles taught these stories to medical students, and, not surprisingly, Coles puts it more eloquently than I could hope to in the Introduction to the New Directions volume of “The Doctor Stories:”
“For years I have been teaching these doctor stories to medical students, and during each class we all seem newly awakened – encouraged to ask the important whys, consider the perplexing ifs. The stories offer medical students and their teachers an opportunity to discuss the big things, so to speak of the physician’s life – the great unmentionables that are, yet, everyday aspects of doctoring: the prejudices we feel (and feel ashamed of), the moments of spite or malice we try to overlook, the very loaded question of money, a matter few of us like to discuss, yet one constantly stirring us to pleasure, to bedeviling disappointment in others, in ourselves. What, in fact, that is really important has Williams left out? Nothing, it seems. He gives us a chance to discuss the alcoholic doctor, the suicidal doctor. He prompts us to examine our ambitions, our motives, our aspirations, our purposes, our worrying lapses, or grave errors, our overall worth. He gives us permission to bare our souls, to be candidly introspective, but not least, to smile at ourselves, to be grateful for the continuing opportunity we have to make recompense for our failures of omission or commission.”
Exactly, Dr. Coles, just what I would have hoped to say. The unflattering points about “The Doctors Stories” are the point. And Williams Carlos Williams did not shy away from the point of the story, from an honest expression of his experiences as a New Jersey doctor in the early-to-mid 20th century.
CONCLUSION
I confess that what there is to be learned about modern medicine and physician contracts from the pages of William Carlos Williams is mainly to be garnered between the lines, in the sense in which they offer a peak into medical history through the eyes and words of a locally-legendary physician and renowned poet. Many things have changed in the practice of medicine (you aren’t likely in the U.S. these days to receive a home-cooked chicken dinner in exchange for providing medical care – but that was once considered an option). The question of whether today we live in the best of times or the worst of times – and the reality is usually somewhere in the middle – advances in medicine are largely something to be thankful for. Indeed, the science involved is very positive and to be appreciated; perhaps the financing of medicine has gotten overly complicated (it has, frankly, but that’s a topic for fuller development elsewhere) but we also probably wouldn’t want to go back to the days of exchanging a chicken for a diagnosis and prescription? Or would we?
And what about the elusive concept of ambiguity in poetry and in physician contracts? When it comes to the latter, my advice concerning ambiguity in the language of physician contracts is to clear it up where you can, before signing. You can navigate your way to a successful contractual relationship with your employer in the healthcare world. But that is much more efficiently, successfully, and happily accomplished when you are on the same page with your employer from day 1. Unexpected developments in medical practice are inevitable – but they shouldn’t be the product of contractual ambiguity.
So much depends upon . . . the terms of your contract. That is a prosaic, not poetic, observation. But it is true.
