Medicine and letters

Though I say it myself, who perhaps should not, doctors make very good writers. They are usually down to earth, not a quality always found among the highly educated. They are the ultimate participant-observers of life; and a little literary talent, therefore, takes them a long way, further indeed than most others.

No doubt I shall be accused of prejudice in favour of my own profession. To demonstrate that I am an unbiased critic, however, I shall cite the work of a doctor who wrote very badly, execrably in fact, the late Dr David Cooper. He was an associate for a time of R.D. Laing, the talented but wayward and self-destructive psychiatrist, and during the Sixties and Seventies of the last century his ravings in book form had a vogue that was (how can I put this kindly?) disproportionate to their intellectual and literary merit.