After Gastroenterology: My Third Act

Since the late 1980s, I have contributed a modest number of original research papers, reviews, and book chapters to the gastroenterology literature. In the past decade or more, I have written also for a general readership. In that time, 4 of my books have been published; a fifth will appear later this year. I have also written numerous essays and articles for magazines, literary reviews, and newspapers, as well as reflective commentaries for Gastroenterology and The Lancet. My books (on death, on medical research, on burnout, on psychoanalysis, on longevity) are unapologetically polemical; I rarely use such qualifiers as “on the other hand” or “some might argue.” If I possess any writerly attribute, it is for synthesis—for fashioning often disparate strands of source material into (I hope) a readable narrative.