The Physician as Storyteller: Ethical Vision and Empathic Imagination in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone

الملخص

This essay explores how fiction re-imagines the physician as both healer and storyteller through an analysis of Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone (2009). Both novels dramatize the ethical consciousness of surgeons who must reconcile the technical mastery of their profession with the fragility of the human condition. Reading these works through the lens of medical and health humanities, particularly narrative medicine and empathy theory (Charon, 2006; Keen, 2007), this study argues that literature provides a reflective space in which medical practitioners and readers alike can confront moral ambiguity, emotional vulnerability, and compassion fatigue.

McEwan’s neurosurgeon Henry Perowne embodies the tension between rational control and ethical uncertainty, whereas Verghese’s Marion Stone transforms the operating theater into a sanctuary of spiritual healing. By juxtaposing these narratives, the essay demonstrates how fiction performs a diagnostic function—probing the ethics of care, the limits of knowledge, and the necessity of narrative empathy in contemporary medicine. Ultimately, the analysis affirms that the physician’s imagination, no less than the scalpel, becomes an instrument of healing.