In his third book, “Blood of Beethoven,” which is due out this summer, a group of terrorist musicians intend to obtain Beethoven's DNA and clone him.
The characters in his three-book series are “a bunch of people in my life whom I have made up, and I really like them, even the bad guys,” said Dr. Rosenfield, a neurologist at the Methodist Hospital Neurological Institute in Houston. “It's a nifty thing to work your way through the world in it. It certainly teaches me a lot about the stuff I have to research and write about. I got on the Internet and figured out how to drive from Baghdad to Grozny. How many guys do that?”
Dr. Rosenfield had wanted to be a poet for as long as he could remember. During his freshman year of college at Brandeis University, he entered 86 poetry contests but never earned recognition from a single one.
“I wanted to be a poet, and I wanted to play rock music,” he recalled. “I became interested in becoming premed halfway through college.”
Years later, finding time to write the books and juggle personal and professional obligations was an ongoing challenge, but it got easier with each book. The first book took 18 years to write. The second took 2 years and the third took less than a year, he said.
“What I had to do was have protected time where I could not be interrupted,” said Dr. Rosenfield, who is also a professor of neurology at Cornell University, New York. “The best place for that is first class on a plane, because you cannot be interrupted. I learned the hard way that I could not dictate [the book]. That was a disaster.”
In order to write effectively, “I have to have 4–6 hours and be alone. I will block out a day. I will get someone to cover for me that day. Then I will go to the office and no one's allowed in. The door is shut. I put on jeans and a T-shirt and my secretary understands 'I am not here. Pretend I'm in Dallas.'”
When asked how much of Dr. Swept's life is based on his own, he replied: “If he ever was, he isn't now.”
He went on to explain that during a recent family trip, he was convinced that the airline had lost their luggage on a return flight home. Once he arrived at the airport's baggage carousel, his wife said to him: “Let's just go home. They'll find the luggage and send it.”
Dr. Rosenfield refused. He wanted to stay until the luggage surfaced.
“What would Swept do?” his wife asked.
He thought about this. Then Dr. Rosenfield realized he'd been standing at the wrong baggage carousel the entire time.
“Swept would never be at the wrong carousel,” he said.
The Speaking Heart
Other physician writers take a more personal approach to their work. Dr. Mimi Guarneri drew from a combination of scientific research, her own experiences, and stories about her patients to create “The Heart Speaks: A Cardiologist Reveals the Secret Language of Healing” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
She describes the book as a personal journal that explores the emotional, spiritual, and mental aspects of the heart.
“I want people to look at the heart as more than a physical pump,” said Dr. Guarneri, a cardiologist who is the founder and medical director of the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine in La Jolla, Calif. “When we think about heart disease, we have to look beyond cholesterol … at whether or not someone is depressed or hostile or isolated—all of these other things that go into how well someone does, not only for the heart but for health in general.”
She went on to credit her patients for teaching her that good care for the heart goes well beyond medicine and biomechanics. “I have evolved because of my patients,” she said. “I never came out of cardiology training thinking about the heart as an emotional organ. I never really thought about broken heart syndrome until I started talking to patients and they told me about the death of their child, or their arrythmia began when they had X amount of stressful things happen. That's where the book came from. The hope for the book is that when you read someone else's story, you'll look at your own life through a different lens. From there, you can start to make change.”
Dr. Guarneri, who majored in English literature as an undergraduate student at New York University, New York, started collecting patient stories on her personal computer at home. “It was in spurts, because there would be a moving story from the day, but not every day,” she said. “I would go home, think about those things, and then I would write what happened. I would also write my reaction to it: what kind of effect this was having on me personally as a physician.”