Richard Selzer (b. 1928) The Discus Thrower LINKS Literature and Medicine--Richard Selzer http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db/ webdocs/webauthors/selzer83-au-.html This brief page includes several of Selzer's works along with summaries and commentaries. Selzer's page is one of many at the larger, intriguing Literature and Medicine Web site, part of the Hippocrates Project from the NYU School of Medicine. BIOGRAPHY Richard Selzer (b. 1928)  The son of a family doctor, Selzer was born in Troy, New York. He attended Union College in Schenectady, New York, and earned an M.D. at Albany Medical College in 1953. He wrote Rituals of Surgery (1974), a collection of short stories, and he subsequently published numerous essays and stories in such magazines as Redbook, Esquire, and Harper's. These he collected in two volumes of essays, Mortal Lessons (1977) and Confessions of a Knife (1979), and a volume of essays and fiction, Letters to a Young Doctor (1982). In 1991, he contracted Legionnaire's disease but went on to document his recovery in Raising the Dead: A Doctor's Encounter with His Own Mortality (1994). In his writing, he draws upon his experience as a surgeon, and as one critic points out, he "forces physicians to think about the morality of medicine."