A pause, a wry smile, a frown, his expressive face echoing his doctor's knowledge, and too, his sensibility as a human being whose work brings him ever so close to the heart of his humanity: we the creature who, through words, asks the philosophical and psychological "whys" of existence. In a sense, the riddles that philosophers and psychologists pose are those that house calls pose for patients and their visiting docs alike. The doctor and the patient behold one another out of need, out of interest, out of their shared humanity.
* * *
So he waxed and waned with words, the house-calling Dr. William Carlos Williams, who could be at different moments fiery, fussy and feisty, and who wanted early in his grown life to be an artist as well as a writer, to "show as well as tell" as he often said, loving the plain, unpretentious truth and energy of the vernacular. Often he' talk of his friend and age-mate Edward Hopper (they were born within a year of each other), refer to one or another of pictures, such as Nighthawks (1942) or Morning Sun (1952), and then a physician's house-call finale: "We meet, greet, hope to heal and grow a bit during these times. People getting on, and now and then helping and being helped, no small thing: helper and helped trying to pull it off, force an illness into a full retreat, win one for a full recovery."
-- Robert Coles: House Calls with William Carlos Williams, MD (2008)
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