10 People From Politics And Entertainment Who Are Also Doctors
1.Ken Jeong
Actor and stand-up comedian Ken Jeong, most famous for his roles as the gangster Chow from The Hangover series and the Spanish teacher Ben “Senor” Chang from Community, got his big break in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, where he played the role of a gynecologist. Interestingly he is actually board certified to practice internal medicine. Jeong went to the medical school of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and pursued residency at Ochsner Medical Foundation in New Orleans. Even after ceasing to practice, he has sometimes unexpectedly found himself using his medical knowledge to save lives as once happened in 2018 when a woman in his show developed seizures, and Jeong jumped to save her life.
2.George Miller
George Miller is a director with varied taste. Sometimes he stews lighthearted, cheerful movies like Babe and Happy Feet, but most of the time he’s brewing up dark, dystopian movies like his Mad Max series. One day while attending medical school at University of New South Wales, he skipped class to watch M*A*S*H followed by Battle of Algiers. Instead of the acting bug, the movie-making bug bit him. After medical school, he enrolled in residency for Emergency Medicine at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. Years later when he made the first Mad Max movie, he based many bloody scenes in the movie on the real trauma cases he had seen in the ER.
3.Michael Crichton
Be it academics or work of fiction, Michael Crichton always aimed for the best. The man who gave us Jurassic Park and Westworld graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1964 and received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1969. But in the last lap of his medical education, he realized that he was not cut out to be a medical practitioner. Crichton was already writing books before he finished medical school. He had written “thrillers of the James Bond‐type” under the pseudonyms to pay for medical school.
4.Khaled Hosseini
You may be surprised to know that the man who gave us The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed couldn't speak a word of English when he came to the US as a 15-year-old boy. He later graduated from UC San Diego School of Medicine with an MD and then did his residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
5.Graham Chapman
Arguably the most recognizable Python, thanks to his leading roles in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Monty Python's Life of Brian, Graham Chapman stood tall in the world of comedy and also in the world of LGBT activism. He was openly gay and was once described as a "comic genius, boozer on an industrial scale," and "sexual gourmand." He started studying medicine at the University of Cambridge, and it was at Cambridge that he met his longtime collaborator and future Python, John Cleese. After graduating from Cambridge, he enrolled in a residency at what is today known as Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry. But his heart was not into medicine, and he quickly adopted full-time comedy writing and performing.
6.Ron Paul
The former congressman from Texas, three-time presidential hopeful, and unwitting victim of Sacha Baron Cohen’s seduction attempt is also a doctor who served as a flight surgeon in the US Air Force. Ron Paul went to Duke University’s School of Medicine and then completed a residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh. He worked as an OB-GYN for around 20 years and had a strict policy of never accepting any federal funds like Medicare and Medicaid. The patients who were eligible for such funding were treated for free at his clinic.
7.Anton Chekhov
This Russian storyteller, whose stories often focus on human misery, foibles, struggles, and small victories in life, quite interestingly trained as a doctor. Unsurprisingly, doctors feature as the protagonist or one of the main characters in 25 of Chekhov’s stories and plays. He famously once wrote to a friend, “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other.” This illustrious author’s life was cut short because of his “lawful wife” as he contracted tuberculosis and had to cease practice, ultimately dying at 44.
8.Howard Dean
The former governor of Vermont and chair of the Democratic National Committee was a medical doctor before he entered politics. After graduating from Yale, he studied medicine at Albert Einstein Medical College, where he also met his future wife, Judith Steinberg. A few years later, he was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives, and politics became his “practice.”
9.Che Guevara
Before he was training the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoise, this much reviled and admired revolutionary was training as a doctor in Argentina. Guevara enrolled in the medical school of University of Buenos Aires, and it was while at medical school that he took the life-changing journey that changed Latin America and echoed all over the world. Che graduated from the university as a doctor but never practiced formally, and he spent most of his life waging guerrilla warfare in the jungles of Africa and South America.
10.Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
One of the most famous writers in the world of English literature, who gave us the detective that soon became the gold standard for fictional detectives, was a doctor. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began his medical studies at The University of Edinburgh (luckily at a walking distance from his house) in 1876 and graduated with the degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery in 1881. It was at medical school that he met the man who left a deep imprint on his literary career. One of Doyle’s professors at the university was a man called Dr. Joseph Bell. It was on him that Doyle modeled the character of Sherlock Holmes, and unsurprisingly The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was dedicated to Dr. Bell.
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