James Champion

(Aired 5/11/24)

In this Open Book, my guest is a practicing psychiatrist who writes under the name James Champion.

He decided to use a different name when writing his first novel to protect the patients he writes about in his account of the two years he spent in medical school as a clinical resident.

“The clinical years of medical school are a unique and challenging experience,” he said - a period in which he was moving to a different rotation (including gynecology, cardiology, pediatrics psychiatry and neurosurgery) every one to two months for two years.

During that time in a small town in Kentucky, he met a motley cast of patients - including one with blue skin (the result of an overdose of oxycontin, a widely abused drug in the community) and worked with a hostile OB-GYN given to throwing tantrums almost daily.

A novel by a doctor writing under the nom de plume Samuel Shem inspired him to write about his experiences as a clinical resident. Shem’s novel, first published in the late 1970’s, is a satirical account of the life of a medical student working as a resident in a hospital. The book’s account of the often abusive working conditions was controversial at the time, but it did help improve working conditions for future medical students.