I received an interesting press release the other day, from the administrator of the “Hippocrates Initiative.” What is this initiative, named after the famous ancient Greek physician, generally considered the father of Western medicine? From the release:
“I am writing to invite you to an event run by the Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine, which will be held…in Venice [Italy] on Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd September.
The Hippocrates Initiative is dedicated to the development of the interface between poetry and medicine. Typically this falls into the following categories: A medicinal theme within poetry, the use of poetry as therapy, and the use of poetry within health professions or education. Now in its fifth year, the Hippocrates Initiative has run four major symposia, and runs international poetry prizes with entries from 55 countries….Please follow this link to learn more about us: http://hippocrates-poetry.org.”
It got this old English major thinking: “medicinal themes” have certainly always appeared in serious poetry. From Chaucer (“With us ther was a doctour of phisik/In al this world ne was the noon hym lik”) to many modern poets, the subject of medicine and its practitioners occurs repeatedly. The philosophical doctor who attends Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s play (written in verse) speaks some memorable lines. Medical metaphors abound in poetry, including modern poetry: T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” begins with the weird but striking lines, “Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table.”
Even more interesting to me are the two other categories the Hippocrates Initiative administrator mentioned: the use of poetry as therapy, and the use of poetry in health education. I have read recently about both.
Poetry as therapy? Writing as therapy, especially journal writing, has become established; many psychiatrists and other mental health professionals encourage patients to keep journals. Some other clinicians do the same. Surely, writing poetry can also serve therapeutic purposes. So can reading or listening to poetry. Serious poetry does not give people challenged by illness (or anyone else) answers to life’s questions—in fact, it tends to raise questions more than give answers. But in its compressed use of language to express universal truths, in its bursts of insight, poetry provides glimpses of beauty that can put the challenges of life in perspective. As medical science learns more about the connections between mind and body, I think poetry will be increasingly incorporated into patient management.
Poetry in medical education? I read recently about a physician-professor-poet, Rafael Campo, MD, of Harvard Medical School, who uses it in his teaching—so that students can learn empathy along with, for example, oncology. Oncologists must know the disease mechanisms of cancer and the pharmacogenomics of cancer treatment—but personalized medicine certainly also means treating the whole patient, and that includes the emotional component of facing serious illness. Dr. Campo is not alone; more and more medical schools are addressing this need of their students. Poetry is becoming part of the curriculum.
Should it be part of the training that clinical laboratory professionals receive? Maybe. How would you feel about a poetry course being part of the clinical lab science curriculum? I think it is useful for anyone in healthcare to be exposed to great poetry as a way to nurture empathy. But I also think most laboratorians “get it.” Some have expressed to me their feelings about the stark reality that test results they process often are matters of life and death for people whom they never know. In her poem “Seeing,” published in the July 2012 issue of MLO, laboratorian-poet Patricia Gail Box Ingram ends with lines that are all the more powerful for being understated: As med techs/We see beauty under the microscope/And we sometimes see death.”
