Of all literary genres, the essay is perhaps the best known and
most widely despised. This is probably because few people reach
the end of their education without having been forced to write
essays upon subjects of no interest whatever to them, and of
precious little interest to their teachers either. For a long
time after I left school the word “essay” connoted for me the
instruction to compare and contrast, at quite unnatural length
and for purposes completely opaque, the characters of Banquo and
Macduff. It was a long time before I wanted to read or write an
essay again.

But brevity is the soul of wit, and there
is often truer
intellect in the distillation needed in the writing of an essay
than in the compilation of every known or discoverable fact about
the subject of a biography. It is better that a reader should
wish an essay were longer than that a biography were shorter. In
good writing, what is left out is at least as important as what
is included.

In recent years, there have been a more than usual number of
elegant scientist- and doctor-essayists: Lewis Thomas, Oliver
Sacks, Steven Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin, for example. Gerald
Weissmann, a rheumatologist at the New York University School of
Medicine, is of their company. They write much better than many
of their more literary confreres, perhaps because science of
necessity clears the mind while literary theory—the Dutch elm
disease of the humanities—of necessity