Dr. Martha Boone on her careers as a urologist and a writer

In this interview, urologist and author Martha Boone, MD, discusses her passion for writing and how she came to write her new book “The Unfettered Urologist.”

Transcription:

Please discuss your careers as a urologist and a writer.

I've been a urologist since 1985. I'm like a dinosaur. I was one of the early women urologists. According to the American Board of Urology, I was one of the first 100 women board certified in urology. I was a woman urologist before I actually knew many women urologists, so all of my mentors were men. As far as the writing goes, I have been writing since I was about 6 years old. I have always written to process my emotions. And then when I was a surgery intern at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, you can imagine in the emergency room, so many things were happening so quickly. I was from a small town in South Carolina, so I had never been around a lot of that inner city, stabbings, gunshot wounds, those kinds of things. And so it was a big emotional shock for me. And so I wrote a lot of stories about Charity, which I ultimately have made into a couple of novels. The stories are loosely arranged around things that I learned at Charity. I've always written to just process emotions.

How did "The Unfettered Urologist" come about?

I predominantly write fiction. And I had been retired about 18 months, and I was shocked to find that patients were still calling me and family members were calling me and referral doctors were still calling me. Atlanta is full of great urologists, so I thought that when I walked out the door, I'd be forgotten in a month. I was shocked that people kept calling me. The calls centered around the same thing. They wanted my experience, but they also wanted my intuition, and they wanted my ability to think outside the box on complex problems. And so despite sending my patients and their referral doctors to great urologists, they were still calling me to find out what else could be done when they had reached the end of the algorithm of what was recommended. That prompted me to think about writing a book. I thought, well, maybe my information is not complete; maybe I can write all these things that people were asking me about and put it in a book format. That's how "The Unfettered Urologist" came to be.

This transcription was edited for clarity.