Well before he attended medical school at Columbia University, New York, Dr. Daniel C. Bryant had been captivated by reading and writing, underscored by an undergraduate degree in French literature that he earned from Princeton (N.J.) University in 1961.
In the 1980s, he began to notice that scores of physicians both past and present had written books on nonmedical topics, so he started combing through reference books and secondhand book shops to collect them in earnest.
“The original motivation to collect these books was a combination of my own interest in writing and vicarious writing in a way,” explained Dr. Bryant, who practiced internal medicine for 28 years in Portland, Maine, before retiring in 1999. “But also it occurred to me in my practice that doctors are so privileged in their access to human experience. They generally have such wonderful educations and wonderful opportunities to see all sorts of people and to travel and to have cultural experiences. They are the ideal people, it seemed to me, to comment on human experience.”
Names of physician writers such as Dr. William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), a pediatrician and poet, came to mind right away, Dr. Bryant said. To locate nonmedical works by other physicians, he tapped into a number of sources, including the reference guide “Contemporary Authors”; “Poetry and the Doctors” by Charles L. Dana (Woodstock, N.Y.: The Elm Tree Press, 1916); “Literature and Medicine: An Annotated Bibliography” by Joanne Trautmann and Carol Pollard (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982); and secondhand book shops in the United States and abroad.
During occasional trips to England with his wife he located many books in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, which is “just a village in Wales, but it's almost entirely book shops,” Dr. Bryant said. “We would often spend a few days there, and I'd get a backpack full of books.”
Before the Internet, “the only way to really find out who had what books was through catalogues,” he said. “I was on the mailing list of many secondhand book shops. I'd get these lists in the mail and spend a few hours a week going through them.”
Favorite books he collected include Dr. William Carlos Williams's first editions and “The Silver River” (out of print, 1938), the first book by Dr. Alex Comfort, who is perhaps best known for “The Joy of Sex” (New York: Crown 1972).
Dr. Bryant also became a fan of the poet Dannie Abse, a radiologist in Wales who writes poetry and plays, and has penned five novels. “He did incorporate his medical experience into his work somewhat,” Dr. Bryant said. “He represents what I was hoping to find: using the medical experience as a window into the bigger human experience and commenting on human experience as a doctor.”
By 2004, his collection grew to more than 1,100 physician-penned books, so he donated them to New York University's Ehrman Medical Library, which established the Bryant Collection of Physician Writers, a permanent collection that is believed to be the largest of its kind (library.med.nyu.edu/library/eresources/featuredcollections/bryant).
“I always liked the idea that physicians have a little bigger perspective and humanistic outlook on things and figured that if these books were in an area where medical students, residents, and staff passed by, they would think about that,” said Dr. Bryant, who lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. “I thought that a medical library would be a good place for them.”
Over the course of his 20-plus years of collecting the books, he came to realize that he's not alone in his high regard for the craft of writing. “I've had many e-mails and contacts from doctors who write or try to write,” said Dr. Bryant, who has published poems and essays in medical journals, written half a dozen short stories for literary magazines, and written crossword puzzles for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. “It does seem that a lot of doctors write about medical subjects; there's a lot of interest in medical thrillers. That seems to be a common theme.”
His interest in collecting more physician-penned books “has waned a bit in the last few years, but occasionally I'll send a few more to the Erhman Library that I come across.”
He called the avocation “an escape into something that I quite enjoyed. It was my golf, I guess.”
As for the Bryant Collection of Physician Writers, he hopes that “it will be added to, that it will inspire medical students and other medical people to take down a book and look at it or even spur them on to do a little writing themselves.”