Medicine runs through the career of Daniel Mason, physician and novelist. Mason was in medical school when his first novel, The Piano Tuner, was published in 2002. His third novel, The Winter Soldier, is the story of a Viennese medical student who is sent, grossly unprepared, to the Eastern Front during World War I; by the time it was published in 2018, Mason was a practicing psychiatrist and assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. 

Mason’s new story collection, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (Little, Brown, May 5), features a cast of doctors and scientists throughout history (among other colorful characters including a 19th-century English boxer and an 18th-century French female balloonist). Kirkus calls it “an enchanting cabinet of curiosities and wonders.”

Mason, based in Palo Alto, spoke about the book a few weeks into the nationwide lockdown prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic; he observed that the crisis has put medical professionals squarely in the public spotlight. “Most doctors aren’t used, in their regular day to day, to passing crowds of people with signs saying “THANK YOU” or getting applauded on the way home,” Mason reflects. He says that he thinks of today’s medical students, like Lucius in The Winter Soldier, being “thrust into this dangerous situation and trying to practice medicine that they’re really unprepared to practice….Doctors are filled with anxiety all the time about whether or not we’re up to snuff.”

The doctors in Mason’s stories are not all heroes. “On Growing Ferns and Other Plants in Glass Cases, in the Midst of the Smoke of London” features a rogues’ gallery of condescending physicians attempting to treat an asthmatic boy in the polluted English capital during the Industrial Revolution; their bizarre treatments only make the patient worse. Forbes, a final doctor, seems more promising. “He starts out by being quite a wonderful doctor,” Mason says. “He’s like the dream doctor that you want. He does this endless detailed physical exam. But then when the patient’s not getting better, he’s not so interested anymore.”

A mysterious medical condition underlies “The Second Dr. Service,” in which a 19th-century country doctor begins to experience blackouts—during which time he is apparently going about his regular life. Except this “other” Dr. Service is a marked improvement on the original—a crack shot, less brooding, more pleasing to his wife. 

“Here’s someone who repeatedly falls ill and is transformed,” Mason explains, “but one of the great divergences is the way he interprets that transformation and the way other people interpret it.” Like so many of Mason’s stories, it developed out of historical research: “There’s this historically interesting case report of a guy who has a seizure and continues to work during the seizure, where he’s impaired, but he’s not that impaired. It was published under a pseudonym, so there’s this mystery around it.” 

The story that gives the collection its title is inspired by the real case of Arthur Bispo do Rosário (1909-1989), a Brazilian outsider artist who spent most of his life in a Rio de Janeiro mental asylum, creating elaborate sculptures and textiles out of found objects, including a spectacular Cloak of Presentation. When Mason stumbled upon a photo of Bispo in the cloak, he recalls, “he looked like a patient I had had back at San Francisco General Hospital, whom I just loved, who had made a suit out of traffic signs….At the time I was very interested in the psychiatric understandings of art produced by people in psychosis.” 

In the story, narrated by Bispo, Mason mimics the artist’s own writing style, characterized by lists of things and idiosyncratic grammar (punctuation in all sorts of unexpected places, for example). For this veteran novelist, re-creating a voice like Bispo’s is one of the unique pleasures of writing short fiction. “A lot of the attraction of the stories is the different language, whether it’s 19th-century medical language or Bispo’s language or the boxing language,” Mason offers. “I love these different kinds of sounds, but I’m aware that it would be hard to sustain a lot of these voices for an entire novel. That’s the day-to-day pleasure of writing them.” Of reading them, too.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.