“Medicine is my lawful, wedded wife, and literature is my mistress” - Russian physician-writer, Anton Chekhov I finished reading Paul Kalanithi’s “When Breath Becomes Air” recently and just started Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The Gene”. I'm a big fan of Atul Gawande and Abraham Varghese too and have read most if not all their books. I wondered whether being Indian American doctors gave these Physician-writers some unique perspective that doctors of other ethnicities didn’t have in writing absorbing medical non-fiction.
Although I suspect it could just be a case of confirmation bias there's no denying that in the last decade, popular medical non-fiction is dominated by authors who are Indian-Americans. A few common characteristics of these authors possibly responsible for their success other than them being Indian-American: The US is a behemoth in the publishing industry. The sheer marketing…
