Freakonomics Blog
Wednesday, March 28, 2007Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner had some great things to say about How Doctors Think on their blog as well as another thoughtful doctor book that has recently come out, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. Here's an excerpt from the post.
"So why do these doctors write so well, and so much better (to my mind, at least) than other non-writers? Perhaps there are elements of doctoring that lie in harmony with writing: peeling back the layers to get to the core of an issue; confronting the obvious but being willing to look beyond it; learning where to 'cut in,' of course; and, more than anything, recognizing that this object before you – in one case a human body, in the other a manuscript – is on a certain level a miraculous object with the power to astound, and on another level is a complex, dynamic system which can (and must be) reduced to a schematic, laid out on paper or x-ray film."
