Bert Keizer
Bert Keizer is a Dutch writer and geriatrician.
He lived in England from 1968-1972 and studied philosophy at the University of Nottingham, then medicine at the University of Amsterdam. He qualified as a doctor in 1981 and then worked shortly in Kenya. Since 1985 he has been a geriatrician in Amsterdam.Writing
As a physician in a nursing home he has written about physician assisted suicide, most notably in his book Het refrein is Hein, which was translated into English as Dancing with Mr D and published by Transworld-Doubleday in 1994. The book was also translated into German, Spanish, Japanese, Danish, Swedish and French.
His style is contemplative, with an undercurrent of realism about the limits of medicine which most people prefer not to think about, and a remarkable intellectual honesty about the emotions of the patient as well as the physician.
While the topic of euthanasia and assisted suicide was the most salient point for the literary criticism, it is not a very large part of the book.
