Between the Scalpel and the Page

There’s something strange, almost contradictory, about reading Russian literature during a surgical rotation. One minute, I’m closing an incision with practiced precision; the next, I’m in the staff lounge, nose buried in The Brothers Karamazov, pondering the meaning of free will. People often ask me how I unwind after long days in the operating room. My answer tends to surprise them: I read Dostoevsky.

For me, literature, especially the dense, philosophical kind isn’t a break from medicine. It’s an essential part of staying balanced within it. Where surgery is sharp, efficient, and tightly bound by protocol, novels are messy, human, and unresolved. They remind me that the world is not only made up of clinical facts and procedures but also of emotions, contradictions, and stories.

Why Dostoevsky?

I came to Dostoevsky during a particularly intense part of my training. I was exhausted physically from the long shifts, emotionally from witnessing trauma, and mentally from the pressure to always be exact. A colleague handed me a worn copy of Notes from Underground, saying only, “This is weird, but you’ll get it.”

They were right. I did get it. I saw in Dostoevsky’s tormented narrators a mirror to the psychological toll that high-stakes work can take. His characters aren’t polished heroes; they’re conflicted, obsessive, burdened by their thoughts. It was comforting, in a strange way. I didn’t need my books to give me an escape. I needed them to show me I wasn’t alone in feeling the weight of uncertainty and responsibility.

Surgery and Storytelling

Surgery, like literature, is about narrative, just a different kind. Every procedure has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s anticipation, a moment of crisis (usually the unexpected twist), and hopefully, a resolution. When I open a body, I read it like a text. The anatomy tells a story sometimes straightforward, sometimes full of complications.

Reading Dostoevsky between procedures doesn’t just give my mind a chance to recalibrate. It also sharpens my empathy. In medicine, it’s easy to see patients as cases. Literature insists I see them as characters, with fears, histories, and contradictions. That shift from case to character is essential if I want to be more than just technically competent.

The Stillness Between Chaos

The operating room is a place of motion: buzzing monitors, clinking instruments, fast decisions. Reading, by contrast, is still. It slows me down in the best possible way. I often steal a few minutes between cases, coffee in hand, to read a few pages. It’s not just an act of relaxation, it’s an act of survival.

In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov spirals between guilt and rationalization, asking whether a person can ever act with pure motives. That question resonates in medicine more than one might expect. Every day, we make choices that affect people’s lives. We weigh risks and benefits. We decide when to intervene and when to hold back. Literature gives me a framework to reflect on those decisions, not as a doctor, but as a human being.

Shared Humanity

One of the most profound realizations I’ve had, whether while assisting in trauma surgery or reading The Idiot, is that we are all deeply fragile. Dostoevsky’s characters are broken in beautifully honest ways. They want to be good, but they often fail. They struggle with pride, faith, jealousy, and love. So do we, beneath the masks and the scrubs.

That’s why reading helps me show up for my patients with greater presence. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and I don’t view suffering as something I can always fix. But literature has taught me to sit with it, to be a witness to it. Sometimes that’s all a person needs: someone willing to truly see them.

Carrying Both Worlds

It’s not always easy to live in two worlds: the precise world of anatomy and the messy world of literature. But I think the tension between them is what keeps me grounded. Surgery is about control. Literature is about surrender. In one, I hold the knife; in the other, I let go and let the story carry me.

There are days when I come home too tired to even cook dinner. But I’ll still read a few pages before bed. It’s a ritual. A way of saying: I am more than what I do. I am still thinking, still feeling, still becoming.

What We Carry

At the end of the day, I don’t think reading Dostoevsky makes me a better surgeon in a technical sense. But it makes me a better listener, a better thinker, and maybe, hopefully, a more compassionate human being. And that matters.

In the sterile corridors of the hospital, it’s easy to lose sight of the deeper questions. Why are we here? What does it mean to suffer? To heal? To be good? Dostoevsky doesn’t give answers, but he gives language to the questions. And for me, that’s enough.

So yes, I read Dostoevsky between procedures. It keeps me sane. It keeps me human. And in a profession that walks so closely alongside life and death, that is no small thing.