After a 50 year clinical/research medical academic career ( a CV of approximately 200 peer reviewed medical papers/book chapters, etc.)  at the lower campus UWMC,  I decided a few years ago to journey to the UW upper campus and obtained a UW BA degree in English Literature, followed now with graduate studies in the same subject. For my future dissertation, I plan on exploring the concordances/discordances between literary and medical writings  composed by authors who were both literary figures and medical physicians, including Smollett, Chekhov, W.C. Williams, Lewis Thomas,  and Oliver Sacks, among others.  In research/statistical parlance, my hypothesis is that there are numerous concordances in the literary v. medical writings of such authors, as evidenced in such variables as the emotional and mental  motivation/impetus of creativity, and in the intellectual (and monetary) return to the writer in creating the works.  However,there may be marked discordances in the influence of the two disciplines  in terms of the structural  and textual design of the works.  

Although continuing 1/2 time as a Professor of Radiology and Medicine at the Medical Center, I much enjoy encountering the frequent ambiguities of literature as contrasted to the probabilities of medical research, as I continue to search for certainties and absolutes.

 I  look forward over the coming years to learning in this new endeavor from my graduate student colleagues and the graduate school faculty.