Cardiologist Mitrovic Publishes Novel 'What If I'm Next?'

There is a kind of writer who reaches literature by a roundabout path, through night shifts and other people’s heartbeats, only to discover, somewhere between two examinations, that a sentence can heal much like a drug can. Predrag Pedja Mitrovic is exactly that sort of writer. A man who spends his days as head of the post-coronary unit and emergency cardiology at Belgrade’s Emergency Center, and his evenings, by his own admission, with a notebook in hand, he has now stepped before readers with a title that sounds like a diagnosis and a prayer at once: “What If I’m Next?”.

Laguna released the novel on July 24, and at its core it carries a simple, almost classical dramatic arc: the fates of four doctors interweave across two eras, two from our present and their ancestors who practiced medicine in the storm of the First World War. Mitrovic makes no secret of the fact that healthcare is his true protagonist, not as a backdrop but as a mirror in which each era recognizes itself by how much it values a human life.

War and clinic, the same measure of a person

What sets this book apart from the flood of domestic historical novels is its refusal to treat the past as a museum exhibit. In Mitrovic’s hands the Great War is not a stage for pathos but a working room in which a doctor, without antibiotics and without electricity, makes the same decisions his successor makes today with all the technology in the world. A writer who has himself stood countless times on the border between life and death has earned the right to that parallel, and it shows on the page, because his doctors do not speak like literary constructs but like people who know how fear smells.

In that sense, the title is no marketing ploy. “What If I’m Next?” is a question, the author argues, that everyone asks themselves, and a doctor perhaps more often than most, because a profession that saves other lives never forgets its own mortality. The novel, then, is not only about medicine but about what remains of a person, a trace, a memory stronger than death, the question of who deserves to be remembered and who vanishes into oblivion.

Why does a doctor sit down to write a novel at all?

Mitrovic’s literary biography is a small anomaly in itself. A full professor of internal medicine, author of more than nine hundred professional publications, a member of the Association of Writers of Serbia and founder of the Belgrade Literary Club, he is one of the few among us who has managed to join two languages that are rarely heard together, the language of science and the language of prose. The story goes that it all began when colleagues persuaded him to write down what he had watched for years in the emergency ward, and from those notes to today’s novel he traveled a road that many writers with a purely literary background never cross.

There remains a question every book like this opens, one the reader must settle alone: to speak honestly about death and the worth of a single life, do we more need the voice of the one seated at the writing desk, or the voice of the one whose hand rests on another’s pulse? What do you think, who knows more about the end?