Writing and surgery

Will Self writes about Dr. Simon Bramhall, the surgeon who inscribed his initials on his patients' livers.

Writing and surgery have many odd congruences: each activity depends for its success on counterfactuals, since there can be no satisfying conclusion to a plot without a potentially unsatisfying one, and no sense of a life being saved unless it could have been lost. Moreover, while any writer may mutilate a text, so any physician may create complications rather than cures. But among medical specialties, only surgery entails such injury by its very nature: you wound patients, with the hope that they’ll both recover from those wounds and benefit from what this wounding has enabled you to do.