Let's write a biography

I'm two years into a three-year effort to tell the story of C. Everett Koop, MD

I’ve written a lot over the years, much of it distinguished by a lack of memorability. Which I guess is part of the point of a blog, that most evanescent of literary forms. Though as such efforts go, a substack is said to have more substance. And therefore demand more of both writer and reader.

I’ve not attempted a biography before, though forty years back my PhD on nineteenth-century religious debate was in part the story of the most interesting of the pugilists. Still with the historian’s hat on I then edited a million-word volume of religious history. Subsequent decades have taken me elsewhere (a book on Hippocrates and medical ethics, and more recently one on robots taking our jobs, along with a smattering of quite decent academic articles). Lest I be accused of jack-of-all-trades inconsequence, allow me politely to point out that the Hippocrates book scored a review in the New England Journal of Medicine, the short volume on technology and labor markets a nice blurb from the deputy editor of The Economist magazine (the magazine having recently flown me to Hong Kong to chat about the subject), together with translations into Korean and Chinese, and indeed the works on religious history and so forth a generation back were welcomed in their appropriate journals. I’m cheekily using the meme from the Hong Kong event as my pic here.

I have however written, and Amazon self-published, a memoir about my childhood, which got me thinking about many things I had thought forgotten, as well as the memoir process. Curious experience; as you dig down the shaft of what you know you remember, it suddenly opens up seams you had entirely forgotten. The more you dig, the more there is. I began advising all my friends to memoirize, if only for their families. There may also be catharsis back there, though maybe not. Memories are potent, unpredictable, beasts.

And so to Dr. Koop. The origin story is simple enough. I knew Koop, and though we weren’t specially close we were certainly friends. He passed in 2013 at the grand age of 96, three years or so after I flew up to Hanover, NH, on some pretext to have lunch with the great man and see him one more time. Something put him back in my mind early in 2020, and I googled around to see if anyone had written a biography or something such. Not a one, and even more curious to my mind: after a slab of substantial obits dropped back in February 2013, there’s hardly a word from anyone about anything to do with him anywhere (even in the pandemic context; I’ll say more about this in a subsequent post, and a bit about it in the book). But no doubt, I thought, biographies being among the books with the longest periods of gestation, something would be in the works. So I pinged Tony Fauci, whom I have met once or twice and who I knew to be close to Koop as we had discussed our mutual friendship. This was mercifully a few weeks before Covid hit the fan, and Fauci - as much the unabashed workaholic as Koop - was still answering his own emails, so I got a speedy answer and a follow-up call. Zippo.

So I decided that someone needed to do this job, and that it would be a job as challenging as fascinating, given the breadth of Koop’s activities and the eclectic character of his sympathies. And here I am.