IN THE COUNTRY OF HEARTS; Journeys in the Art of Medicine <i> by John Stone (Delacorte: $17.95; 211 pp.) </i> : THE TABOO SCARF; And Other Tales of Therapy <i> by George Weinberg (St. Martin’s: $19.95; 324 pp.) </i>

Of all professionals, doctors seem to carry the most ambitious literary aspirations; the tradition goes back to Somerset Maugham and Arthur Conan Doyle and can be seen most recently in the boom of belletristic books about patients and hospital life. Medicine and literature might seem an unlikely marriage--one focused on survival, the other on transcending it--but the best physician-writers seem perceptive largely because they have been in a position to see our most essential emotions. At the same time, as these two books show, doctors can make the mistake of assuming that because medicine essentially makes literature possible, medicine itself must be literature.

“In the Country of Hearts” be gins promisingly, for the author, a cardiologist at Atlanta’s Emory University, crafts warm, caring prose that suggests the metaphorical heart as it describes the literal one: “a pump, commissioned to its Sisyphean labor in the embryo, where its beat began as a microscopic nudge, then a ripple.” It bequeaths “3 billion heartbeats to the average person in a lifetime,” Stone writes in contagious wonder, “with no down-time for lubrication, no oil changes required.”

Unfortunately, once the power of Stone’s paean fades, there is little left but a lay person’s manual on cardiology and a mundane diary of medical life. Stone quotes warning labels on instruments, for instance, describes ordinary diagnostic procedures, even details how he gets dressed before entering an operating room. All the while he strains to make these stories “literary,” observing a doctor, resident and nurse in an operation, for instance, and then quoting a lovely, though irrelevant, quatrain from Macbeth about three witches.

“The Taboo Scarf,” in turn, lacks the dramatic density of good fiction: We are fascinated as George Weinberg the detective tracks down the mysterious causes of his patients’ neuroses but sometimes bored as Weinberg the psychologist bushwhacks through their emotional defenses to get them to see the problem. Nevertheless, medicine and art do manage to unite in these pages, for Weinberg essentially practices medicine as an art, interweaving his own life with that of his patients to an extent that is bound to trouble more traditional psychotherapists. For example, when Lisa, a young patient who feels comfortable conversing only with her cats, calls him in tears because she doesn’t have enough money to take one of them to the vet, Weinberg offers to foot the bill. Weinberg’s reply to his anticipated critics is testy (“How despicable are the precisionists in psychology who care more about the operation than the patient!”), but his strategy seems justifiable, for it is based on an educated guess that her dependence on him in the short-term will help her become independent in the long-term.