I first became interested in medicine and the arts in about 2000, when the theatre director Caroline Smith started the InterAct Reading Service, which takes actors into hospitals to read and perform for stroke patients. She invited me to become a trustee. Some miraculous things happened. One patient, who was French, hadn't spoken since her stroke three years previously. As her reader read a French poem, the lady joined in.

Together, they recited the poem. Not a word wrong. Families started to time their visits so they could be there when the patients were being read to. It broke the ice. Something good happened, something to be shared. Doctors decided that the brain was stimulated by art and that InterAct made a difference. Now we read at 20 hospitals and over 50 stroke clubs.

When a close friend got cancer, I decided to write a play about what it was like. What happened in the hospital? What were the doctors like? I talked to doctors, patients, nurses and loved ones. I had a wheelbarrow full of material. I got in touch with Trevor Walker, professor of drama at St Mary's University College, Twickenham, as I knew he was interested in applied theatre. He read the material and gave me ideas about how to make it into a play. Since then, Trevor has directed Cancer Tales in many countries and at cancer conferences all over Britain.

Then I wrote Lost and Found, a play about surviving a stroke, learning to speak again and the struggles around creating a new life. Caroline Smith directed it in Glasgow on a snowy night in December 2010, with actors from InterAct. The research for Lost and Found was hard, because so many people who survive a stroke can't speak clearly. You have to pay attention in a different way.

Rembrandt made his name with the beautiful Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, which unsparingly depicts the dissection of a human corpse. It casts the surgeon as hero. The US painter Thomas Eakins followed at the end of the 19th century with The Gross Clinic, which shows a group of doctors in their everyday clothes, with students watching eagerly as a surgeon performs an operation. Again, the surgeon as hero. Eakins went on to paint The Agnew Clinic, in which what looks like a mastectomy is taking place. It was commissioned by undergraduates in 1889 to honour Dr Agnew on the occasion of his retirement. By this time, they must have learned something about germs: all the participating doctors are dressed in white.

Surgeons are indeed heroes - such as the two who carried out a seven-hour operation on my partner. A six-centimetre tumour had grown through the wall of the lung on to his heart. Only a madman or a hero would attempt to remove it. Because of the decision to operate, my partner had another seven years of happy life.

There is a wonderful painting by Rodrigo Moynihan, who, having been invalided out of the British army, became an official war artist. In 1943, he painted Medical Inspection. It shows a group of men about to be sent off to fight in the Second World War. In the visible vulnerability of these men - half dressed, scrawny, being inspected by the switched-off doctor - there is a kind of despair that says so much about war.

My third medicine play, Home Death, draws from the outrage I experienced when my partner died at home after six hours in pain. No morphine had been available to him. The play had its first performance in May, directed by Trevor Walker at the Royal Society of Medicine to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the National Council for Palliative Care.

I was told by the district nurse who visited my partner when he was dying that district nurses weren't allowed to prescribe morphine but a doctor in palliative care said they were. It seems a muddle. I so disapprove of this puritan approach to morphine on the day of your death. Why can't we, with a prescription from our doctor, get morphine in good time and administer it ourselves when needed?

Death is a huge experience and whether it goes well or not makes a terrific difference to how those left behind cope with the sadness and loss. Art can open our eyes to the emotional side of medicine. What I find most interesting in life, what I find most challenging and satisfying to write about, is medicine. l

“Home Death" is at the Finborough Theatre, London SW10, on Sundays and Mondays between 10 and 25 July