Kate Hall on medicine and writing
Blogs and extras are bonus content to supplement the work in our issues. In Issue 22, A Life in 36 Corpses explores the impact of death from a medical practitioner's perspective. We asked author Kate Hall, a former paediatrician, how her medical experience has influenced her writing.
Medical science, whether factually correct or not, is often a big influence on literature. How have you found your medical experience influences your creativity, and do you consider it an advantage to have when writing?
I think working as a doctor can be a disadvantage for creativity and writing because the job uses up so much energy. I know there are lots of amazing writers who are also practising doctors, like Renee Liang and Glen Colquhoun and Eileen Merriman and lots of others. But I didn’t start writing at all until after I left work in 2022. A Life in 36 Corpses is my first published story. When I was in my job, I didn’t have much left for anything outside my work and my family.
When I wrote A Life in 36 Corpses, I was thinking about how my medical background affected me when someone close to me died. Many of my friends and family had only seen dead bodies in a funeral home. Those bodies had make-up on and they’d been arranged for viewing. But I’d seen people die and I’d cut into cadavers and it felt like a secret I was keeping.
As a doctor you do keep a lot of secrets. Most of my workday was confidential. I met a huge range of people from a lot of different backgrounds, and it was usually at quite an intense time in their lives. I worked mainly in hospital wards and emergency departments for the first ten years and then mainly with children and their families in the community for the next twenty years. I think those encounters influence my writing because they influence the way that I understand people and my world view. I try to write about the way it felt without drawing on any real events from my work. It would be awful if any former patients thought I’d used their story in my fiction.
I think illness and death and injury show up in most literature in some form, because they are part of being alive. When I think “medical science”, I think of gruesome novels like Frankenstein and the Kay Scarpetta series. I don’t think I’m very well-read compared to other writers. I was more likely to collapse in front of the TV than read a book when I was working. I have a lot of books to catch up on now. I have seen lots of TV series and movies about medicine. I used to be obsessed with the movie Paper Mask when I was a junior doctor in the 1990s. An orderly poses as a doctor and manages to fool everyone by getting the nurses to tell him how to do things. I used to ask the nurses to help me all the time, so it struck a chord. I was terrified I might end up killing someone by accident like the character in the movie does.
