BOOK REVIEW : A Physician Examines Art, Science : THE DOCTOR WITH TWO HEADS: ESSAYS ON ART AND SCIENCE<i> by Gerald Weissmann</i> Alfred A. Knopf$19.95, 240 pages

Quick. What did Somerset Maugham, William Carlos Williams, Anton Chekhov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Gertrude Stein--almost--have in common?

Answer: They were all trained as physicians (Stein dropped out of medical school in her last year), though they made their marks as writers and are remembered today for their skill with the pen. Perhaps some doctors acquire a special quality, an insight into the human condition, that enables them to see things clearly and, more important, to convey it with clarity and verve.

This skill is not limited to poetry or fiction. Among contemporary writers, Lewis Thomas, Richard Selzer and Oliver Sacks are working doctors who write elegant essays about medicine and science and about how they interact with broader themes of art and life.

In training and temperament, all of these people span the two cultures. They are scientists and humanists, and the combination, when done well, is irresistible.

Gerald Weissmann, a physician and professor of medicine at New York University Medical Center, is in this noble tradition. “The Doctor With Two Heads” is his third collection of essays, many of which explicitly and perceptively explore the intricate relationships between art and science.

As C. P. Snow correctly observed 30 years ago, there is usually a wide gap between those two worlds. People tend to gravitate toward one or the other. Weissmann, however, is knowledgeable and comfortable in both. The most appealing part of his book is the implicit assumption that the two ways of knowing need not be all that far apart. In Weissmann’s hands, they aren’t.

He rues the split. “The unity of all cultural effort had been the unwritten rule of the Western world from Aristotle to Maimonides, from Avicenna to Spinoza, from the Florentine Academia to the philosophes ,” he writes.

By the 18th Century, he says, the split began and has intensified since. There have been advantages and disadvantages as a result. Art and science have each progressed, but have become narrow in the bargain.

“It is unlikely that modern drama would have differentiated to its absurdist phase, or that we could be influencing heart attacks by antiplatelet drugs, had we not first separated one art from the other and one science from the next,” Weissmann says. “We have paid a heavy price for that differentiation. We have made junkyards of our cities, clowns of our rulers, gibberish of our journals and boors of our chemists.”

“It is sometimes difficult to be sure what we have gained in the process--other than dramas of Genet and the discovery of how blood clots. I am sure that among the advantages we have gained has been a life span long enough for most of us to go expertly about any business we wish, including that of art or science.”

Must depth always be bought at the price of narrowness? Can anyone be both deep and broad? In one essay, Weissmann thinks about medical students, who must master much practical information and many skills in their four-year education.

He acknowledges this need, but he thinks it is a mistake to send doctors into the world who are not well-schooled in the humanities, for in the end, doctors must treat people, not diseases. Medicine should be a learned profession, not a trade.

In past times, he says, “American doctors were expected to enter medical school able to distinguish between John Quincy and Henry Adams, John and Thomas Dewey, or Isaiah and Irving Berlin. But those expectations went the way of the tail fin, and nowadays we have been reduced to presenting the stuff of “Masterpiece Theater” to students deprived of experience in the broader culture. We would be better advised to teach medicine to cultivated students rather than culture to medical students.”

Throughout these essays, Weissmann shows the parallels and interplay between the scientific and humanistic world views. Doctors are detached observers. So are painters. Modern literature abounds in short, repetitive sentences, just like the genetic code. Abstract Expressionist art is like biochemistry--reductionist in the extreme.

“Modern biochemical medicine has for too long persuaded its practitioners that patients are simply the sum of abnormal laboratory values,” Weissmann writes. “Too many of us now believe that when we understand the gene, we know the person.”

There is a bonus to the essays collected here. Almost all of them are interesting and useful in their own right (there are one or two clinkers in the collection). Taken together, they reveal a subtle and perceptive mind at work, a doctor whose thoughts range over all human experience and who synthesizes diverse parts of it.

“In any successful collection,” Weissmann notes at one point, “the real subject of each essay is the mind of the author.” The remark is not intended to be self-descriptive, but it is.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU” by Samuel Walker.