how Walker Percy might fit in all of this

a couple weeks ago I interviewed Carl Elliott. he was, of course, 49 at the time of our conversation, but he's 50 now.
and one of the books Carl's been involved in is The Last Physician: Walker Percy & the Moral Life of Medicine. it's not the book of his that Carl suggested I read (actually, I'm still missing that specific recommendation) because it's not a book he wrote but rather co-edited.
but I've got it and there's a chapter by Ross McElwee, the director of Sherman's March and Time Indefinite and Bright Leaves and . . . (I'm a fan so that's a good thing), and Carl wrote the introduction. part of which goes like this:

I had received a short note from Walker Percy, a reply to a letter I had sent him a number of months previously. My own letter was a little embarrassing, to be honest. I had written with some questions about the place of existentialist philosophy in his novels, but what I was really hoping for was some kind of approval for what I was planning to do. Which was, in effect, to give up medicine, leave the South, move to Scotland, and study philosophy. Not many other people seemed to think this was a very good idea. When I had told one of my psychiatry professors, he had recommended psychotherapy. Percy's note was more gratifying. He said that I should read Kierkegaard and Heidegger ('nearly impenetrable, but worth it'), and then in closing: 'We need more philosophers.' Close enough to approval for me. What use did I have for grinning dentists and this quiet South Carolina desperation?

by the way, after college in South Carolina and med school in South Carolina, Carl Elliott moved to Scotland and earned a PhD in philosophy.
he now works as a bioethicist in Minneapolis, Minnesota.