The dermatologist can be a main character in nonmedical books: A succinct review of fiction novels, including a summary about their authors, in which a dermatologist is either the protagonist, antagonist, or deuteragonist

Abstract

Authors of fiction are unique. They develop the characters of their novels for their readers, with the main character of a book being the protagonist. Other important characters include the antagonist and the deuteragonist. This paper focuses on fiction novels in which one of the key characters is a dermatologist. Biographic sketches that describe some of the features of the authors who write these novels are provided. The authors include nine nonmedical writers: Sue Civil-Brown, Tom Jordon, Janice Kaplan, Lynn Schnurnberger, Carolyn See, Terry Southern, Camy Tang, Bruce Wagner, and Sheila Gewirtzman. They also include a nondermatologist physician (Sara Cohen who is a physiatrist and writes under the pseudonym Freida McFadden), and dermatologists Terry Cronin and Garry Gewirtzman (who writes with his wife Sheila, who is an accountant). A total of 10 dermatologists are included in the 18 books in which a dermatologist is a main character; one author wrote three books that had the same dermatologist as a protagonist, and a husband and wife team of writers wrote a series of seven novels in which a dermatologist was featured. The fictional dermatologists were either the protagonist (seven dermatologists in 15 novels), the antagonist (two dermatologists), or the deuteragonist (one dermatologist). The 18 novels were written by 12 authors. Nine of the authors had not attended medical school; however, three of the authors were physicians. Seven books were written by a husband and wife team (a dermatologist and his accountant wife). One book was written by two women who were not physicians. The dermatologist is a man as in six of the dermatologists or a women as in four of the dermatologists. All four of the women dermatologists were characters in novels written by women (five authors). The six men were included in books by either a man (four authors) or a woman (one author) or coauthors (including both a man and a woman). Some writers publish their novels under a pseudonym, with the authors having various personal reasons for using a pen name. Six of the 12 (50%) of the authors who wrote a novel with a dermatologist as the main character either used a pseudonym in that novel, or a different book, or both. Many of the nonphysician authors (five of nine, 56%) used a pen name; these included three women and two men. Only the woman physician author used a pseudonym. One of the men used a shortened version of his first name and did not include the suffix after his last name; both of the men did not include their middle name or the first letter of their middle name. The dermatologist—as either a protagonist, an antagonist, or a deuteroantagonist—provides the reader with an intriguing character in a novel.