Richard Selzer and the Rhetoric of Surgery

Reviews / Votes

Why would a surgeon write? "[I write] to domesticate my terrors... I do it to ward off disease, fend off death, to give pain a name. I think I should have died at the age of forty if I had not begun to write. For me to write is to transform all of my helplessness and despair as a surgeon into an affirmative act of creation." -Richard Selzer