Dr. David Biro, a dermatologist in Bay Ridge, where he grew up, is telling a story about a difficult day in a physician’s waiting room. A patient, frustrated by a long wait, pulls a gun, and an already complicated profession becomes much more complicated.
Rather than recounting a story from his own waiting room, the Bay Ridge dermatologist and nonfiction and fiction author was describing a scene from his fifth book, “The Unstoppables” (Regalo Press, an imprint associated with Simon & Schuster). He held a signing at his hometown bookstore, The BookMark Shoppe, on Wednesday, Aug. 19.
In addition to being a dermatologist at Bay Ridge Skin and Cancer Dermatology P.C., Dr. Biro is an author with a doctorate in literature whose nonfiction and fiction have been published by major presses.
“I was always a big reader. I was always into literature and reading,” Dr. Biro, 62, said recently. “I love to read and experience these alternate worlds. I like language and people who have a way with words.”
“The Unstoppables,” like much of his work, is set in Bay Ridge, where he grew up and now practices. It tells the story of Dr. Richard Kline.
“All my stories pretty much take place in Bay Ridge,” he said. “It’s a place that means to me so much growing up and practicing there. I’m drawn to Bay Ridge and the Verrazano Bridge.”
The story follows a doctor facing adversity who turns to old friends for help in a tale involving crime, romance, childhood and friendship.
“The story goes back and forth with those three boys, the Unstoppables. They did all sorts of crazy things,” he continued. “As the doctor goes to them for help, they’ll get into more trouble together I think the most important thing about this book is friendship. a childhood friendship rekindled in adult life.”
Dr. Biro followed in the footsteps of his father, Laszlo, a Hungarian immigrant who came to the United States in 1956 and became a dermatologist. Biro grew up in Bay Ridge, attended Poly Prep High School and took over his father’s practice.
“I feel lucky to have grown up in a place like Bay Ridge in a time where there were no cell phones, no helicopter parenting,” he said. “We were more free.”
He studied classics at the University of Pennsylvania, reading Greek and Latin authors such as Virgil, Horace and Ovid, before attending Columbia University’s medical school.
“I started wondering if I made the right decision when I went from classics to medicine,” Dr. Biro said. “I took some classes at Columbia’s downtown campus. I met a history of medicine professor who became a mentor.”
He decided to take a leave of absence after his third year to obtain a doctorate in English literature at Oxford University, writing a thesis about the language of pain. He then “went back to get a medical degree,” becoming a general dermatologist specializing in cancer care and skin cancer surgery.
While physician authors are not as common as attorney authors, Dr. Biro points to well-known physicians who also became authors, including W. Somerset Maugham, Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle and Michael Crichton.
“Being a doctor, you’re thrust into very emotional, high-stakes stories, meeting all sorts of different people along the way,” he said. “There’s a lot of material that you can probably get from one’s experiences as a doctor.”
Doctors take a patient’s history, but Dr. Biro said a patient’s “story” is crucial to caring for them.
“Story is important to both,” he said. “Narrative is critical for a doctor, to learn what’s going on with a patient, what brought them there.”
He began by writing a memoir after finishing medical school, when he was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder and needed a bone marrow transplant. He wrote “100 Days: My Unexpected Journey from Doctor to Patient,” published by Pantheon.
“I developed this problem in my eye. My blood count started dropping. Within six months, I had a bone marrow transplant,” he said. “That was a harrowing experience. I wrote about it.”
The New York Times Book Review called his first book a “vivid memoir…lucid and gentle. It is the story of a doctor with the heart of a poet.”
His second book, “The Language of Pain: Finding Words, Compassion, and Relief,” was based on his doctoral dissertation. He then wrote two novels, published by Lake Union.
“This Magnificent Dappled Sea” was released in 2020, its title drawn from what a doctor sees when looking at blood cells through a microscope. The book is about a boy in Italy who needs a bone marrow transplant, which he receives through an international registry from a rabbi in Brooklyn.
“And The Bridge is Love,” published in 2021, is about three older women who meet every Tuesday in a secluded spot near the Verrazano Bridge, telling stories, drinking and watching boats go by.
“Eventually, they decide time is running out and they need to do something,” Dr. Biro said. “Maybe instead of watching the boats, they should go on the boats.”
“The Unstoppables” begins with a quote from poet Louise Glück: “You look at the world once in childhood,” she wrote. “The rest is memory.”
“I think it conveys something about this,” he said. “These three guys don’t speak to each other for forty years. They can easily go back to where they were.”
Professionally, Dr. Biro is a doctor first, but also a writer and teacher. He teaches a course in medicine and literature at SUNY Downstate Medical Center.
“It gives students a chance to talk about issues that have come up,” Dr. Biro said. “Medical students are often privy to many serious, emotional experiences. People dying, families upset. They don’t really have time to talk about these things, but they come up in books all the time and students can relate.”
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The Philadelphia Inquirer and various medical journals.
He writes in the mornings before going to work in Bay Ridge, taking a few years to write and edit each book.
“It’s great when I hear somebody who read one of my books and really likes it. Or a patient comes up to me and says, ‘I didn’t know you write,’” Dr. Biro said. “So much of my life has been the doctoring side. But I wouldn’t trade either one in. I love them both.”
