ABSTRACT
To follow Siddhartha Mukherjee’s arc as a writer is to pass beyond oncology clinic and lab onto the varied terrain of his long books and short essays that often begin in story and end with the truths science generates. Along the way, history of medicine, biography, family genealogy, and literature complicate and invigorate the corpus of his science writing. Highlighting the range of Mukherjee’s historical and cultural interests, this chapter also foregrounds this doctor-writer’s often venturesome formal and compositional decisions, including his choice of disciplinary genres, novelistic modes of narration, and his craftsman’s sense of the heft and tint of words (like “tenderness” or “esthetics”/“beauty”) that he deploys to leverage thinking in between medicine and literature. Mukherjee’s tending to key words and his reflections on the nature and function of writing per se produce a simple yet incandescent prose, which for all its literariness never falls far from its medico-biological home. One of the most lucid of our contemporary explicators of scientific arcana, Mukherjee possesses an intellectual plasticity that, in his best writing, allows him to work in several discrete languages—medical science, history, and aesthetics—modulating them into mutually intelligible dialects capable of refreshing our modes of knowing and responding to the human condition.
