“The medical outlook,” by Anthony Daniels

Although I have been writing for publication for more than forty years, it always pleases (and surprises) me when someone writes to tell me that he or she has read something that I have written. It is reassuring to know that I have not been merely sending messages in a bottle over the ocean from a remote island, never to arrive at any destination.

I was all the more delighted, therefore, unexpectedly to receive a letter from a French doctor who said that she had read me with interest and pleasure. She, too, was a writer, and she sent me a short piece that she had published in a medical journal, which I found to be of great merit both in form and content. She invited me to a public reading of her work if I happened to be in Paris on a certain date, which happily I was.

The reading, by a talented professional actress, was excellent, and I recognized at once that Dr. Adriana Langer was a fine writer. Her style was limpid, but her thought and feeling were deep and subtle.

I was surprised to discover that she was a radiologist. The profession of medicine is an excellent school for writers, but I had rather thought of radiologists as unsocial, almost mole-like creatures more at ease with images than with people, working away at their screens in darkened rooms and sending out messages, again in metaphorical bottles, to their clinical confreres.

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