Dr Maria is a good oncologist because she doesn’t bullshit you. Relationships with healthcare professionals speak volumes to the medical reader. ‘Caroline Mathers had been a bomb and when she blew up everyone around was left with embedded shrapnel.’ The realisation that, as another dying teenager, she can ultimately only inflict pain on those who love her makes Hazel then withdraw from her parents too.
When Hazel muses on why she shrinks from her new boyfriend Augustus’ touch, she suddenly realises it is because she is afraid of repeating what his previous girlfriend Caroline did to him - namely dying. The effects of having cancer on family and friends are nailed with heart-breakingly evocative metaphor. She may be confusing side effects with complications and from a purely scientific viewpoint is probably wrong, but we see what she means. As Hazel Grace, the novel’s 13-year-old narrator with metastatic thyroid cancer, tells us on the opening page ‘depression is not a side effect of cancer. It is an exquisite example of how the humanities can reach deeply into essential parts of medical education that the comparative objectivity of science cannot.Īs the Shakespearean allusion in the title suggests, The Fault in Our Stars is about two highly articulate teenagers, who, although not typical of any teen patients I have ever met in their philosophical and literary awareness, certainly convey powerfully the inside story of what it’s like to have cancer and challenge some of our common misconceptions. I hope I did eventually manage to cotton onto some of them from my patients in 30 years of clinical practice but this novel manages to do the job equally well in the space of a few hours.
Perhaps the important things about cancer doctors can’t learn from textbooks.
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