During and after the war, he traveled in India, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

He worked for the service in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917 in the Russian Empire. His first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time.ĭuring the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service. He did not want to become a lawyer like other men in his family, so he trained and qualified as a physician. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s.īoth Maugham’s parents died before he was 10, and the orphaned boy was raised by a paternal uncle, who was emotionally cold. Medical Education Somerset Maugham St Thomas's Hospital.William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) was an English playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. The example of Maugham suggests that medical education may have value other than the training of doctors-to-be. In old age he wrote 'I learned pretty well everything I know about human nature in the 5 years I spent at St Thomas's Hospital'. His experience as an Obstetric Clerk in the slums of London inspired his first novel, Liza of Lambeth. He observed and learned about people he saw poverty, squalor and death. Despite his lack of vocation, his five years at medical school proved to be the key experience in his artistic development. From his teens his sole ambition was to be a writer: medicine did not interest him. He enrolled as a medical student at St Thomas's Hospital mainly to escape from his uncle and also to live in London. He spent a lonely adolescence under the guardianship of his uncle, an emotionally distant clergyman. His childhood was marred by bereavement, losing both parents before the age of ten years.

His prose style was simple, witty his world view weary and cynical. He excelled in several genres, writing novels, plays, short stories, travel-books, memoir and criticism. William Somerset Maugham was one of the most successful and prolific authors of the twentieth century.

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