We recently connected with Martha B. Boone, M.D. and have shared our conversation below.

Martha B. , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?

How does a surgeon become a writer? I’ve always written stories since I was in grammar school. I loved to take anything that happened in the real world and tweak it and add to it to transform it into an interesting story.
You might say that I’m a natural born liar!
Once I became a surgery resident at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, I began to write stories to manage my emotions. Ours was the busiest trauma center in America during the late 1980’s and the gunshot wound and stab wound victims and the plethora of “man’s inhumanity to man” was very shocking to my system. I’d grown up in a small sleepy town in the low country of South Carolina and had never seen the world that inner city crime brought to my daily life. I was very naive and quite shocked to learn of the world of drugs, violence, debauchery and crime. I was also shocked by the dark humor that helped the people caring for the folks of this underworld tolerate their jobs.
So, from 1985 until hurricane Katrina destroyed the hospital in 2005, I wrote stories about my time as a resident at Charity.
Most of the stories were for my own entertainment. I sent many to one of my mentors at Tulane. He was a world renown trauma surgeon, Dr. Norman McSwain. He kept them in a stack beside his chair in his library in his home on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
He was one of the last people to leave the city after the hurricane. He stayed behind to help save as many patients as possible.
He began to push me to put my stories into a novel in an effort to preserve the memory of one of the greatest hospitals in the world that was specifically designed to care for people with no financial means. It was founded in 1736 to render medical care to the poor of New Orleans.
One day, he was being particularly aggressive in insisting that I “write the book”. I explained that my medical practice required 80 hours a week of my time and that writing was just a fun hobby. He persisted. In jest I said, “OK Dr. McSwain, I’ll write the damn book if you will let me use your name and make you a real character.”
He shocked me when he said, “I’d be honored. Now, get to work.”
When your surgery professor gives you an order, you follow through, never mind that I was 57 years old.
I started waking up at 4 a.m. to write the book. The Big Free came together in 4 months. He read the unedited third draft and approved. I hired a professional editor and began seeking routes to publication.
Two years later, I had my first novel in hand. Unfortunately, Dr. McSwain died a few weeks before he was able to see the final book.
Being forced to have a ritual to write gave me the incentive to do more. I joined the Atlanta Writers Club, one of the best writing clubs in America, and learned more about the craft and the business of writing.
I have since published a nonfiction book, The Unfettered Urologist, and the sequel to my novel, Mother Charity.
As I’ve traveled the country talking about my books, I’ve been impressed that so many are nostalgic about having trained, worked, or been a patient at Charity Hospital. I’ve also been able to appreciate the fact that anyone who trained at a major inner city hospital has similar stories. The stories became “our stories” and not just my stories.
I’ve also come to know that Dr. Norman McSwain, Charity Hospital and Tulane Medical School have been a training ground for greatness all over America.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

When I first decided to become a urologist, it was 1980 and I was told by several men in power that “Urology is not a job for girls.” I remember walking out of the office of a man who held the power to let me in or not, thinking, “if there are no girls in it, ya’ll probably need some dang girls! ”
I’d grown up in a lower middle class family with lots of time working on a farm. I didn’t see any particular job as belonging to any particular sex. On the farm, if you were physically capable, it was your job. The large family that raised me was full of hard working people who did their duty and believed in personal responsibility.
When I told my father that it seemed they didn’t want women in my chosen profession, he said, “If you really want to do it, make sure you are really good at it.”
So, instead of trying to figure out where might want to take a female, I started to seek out the best programs in the country.
Lucky for me, Tulane Urology and Tulane Surgery were very forward thinking and were willing to consider any hard working and intelligent candidate. I got my first choice in residency training programs and felt supported along the way. Surgery is hard for everyone training in that field. I focused on always doing the absolute best for my patient and in knowing the most up to date scientific information about what I was doing and chose to ignore the superfluous opinions of those not yet ready for women in surgical subspecialties. When I started, Urology was 98% male doctors and when I retired, it was 93% male doctors.
I not only survived, but I thrived. I believe my being a woman was a positive because I never let it be a detractor and I was blessed to be in a system that supported me.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My mission in my novels has been to give people not in the medical world, a true look behind the curtain that is medicine. I think television and the movies have done a mediocre job in showing what it’s really like. Another mission in my novels is to show the importance of the team approach and the great value of the nurse in the world of medicine. The nurses are the people who are there 24/7 with the patient and if you have a great hospital, it’s because you have great nurses. As a surgeon, I know that I would be ineffective without my team. I want the public to realize on a more realistic level what that looks like. I did not set about to show the progress women have made in the fields of surgery, but I have inadvertently shown the world how hard it was to be one of the early women in surgery. Sometimes it feels that we have made little progress and my novels document the great progress for women in surgical fields.
Another mission in my novels is to give the opportunity for the thousands of people who passed through Charity Hospital in New Orleans and the many inner city hospitals across our country to have the pleasure of the nostalgia of reliving those glory days. All of us knows that if you could make it in one of those rough and tumble environments, you could make it anywhere.
The mission in my nonfiction book is to give quality information about topics about which I am an expert and to put control in the hands of the patients. Alternative medicine, conventional medicine, intuition and experience all combine with modern technology to provide answers to common urology problems. People with little science education have a very difficult task in figuring out what information is quality and what is bogus. The people with the best websites are not the ones with the best information when it comes to science. The Unfettered Urologist is an attempt to get quality information into the hands of people who need it most in an effort to make their experience the best it can be.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://marthaboone.com/
• Facebook: https://marthaboone.com/
• Other: This page has a problem. I tried to include my website, www.marthaboone.com and my twitter and my FB and it would not take the links???