It is a relatively recent finding in psychology that whenever people experience an emotion, if the emotion is strong enough to remember at the end of the day, in nine cases out of ten they will have told it to several people. Training in medicine, and working continually with illness and death, is a potent source of strong emotions. Here, in Call Me Doctor, Shane Neilson, physician and poet, does not just confide orally to people he knows. In his book about some of the emotion-inducing experiences of his training and early years as a doctor, he shares confidences with a much wider circle.
Call Me Doctor is a collection of short pieces. The first is about Neilson being warned by a committee that he is close to being thrown out of Dalhousie Medical School for lateness, inappropriate attire and disrespect. The collection includes experiences such as these: having as a mentor in a poor part of Halifax an overworked doctor whose patients praise him...
Keith Oatley is professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and winner of the 1994 Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel. His most recent novel, Therefore Choose, was published in 2010 by Goose Lane. His recent books on Psychology include Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction (Wiley 2011) and The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories (Oxford University Press 2012). He wishes to thank his colleagues Maja Djikic, Jacob Hirsch, Raymond Mar, Jennifer de la Paz, Jordan Peterson and Sara Zoeterman.
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