Poetry from clinical experience
A clinician's experience can become a poem. Clinicians write poetry for what it does for their language and for them, journals publish and reward it, and clinicians' poems take forms that range from the prose poem to rhymed stanzas.
Why clinicians write poetry
Rafael Campo answers why medical students should write poems with an argument that centres on the thesis that "Physicians who lack a passion for language or who fail to see beauty will be at a loss to translate these wonders in the most meaningful terms for their lay patients and into the larger society around us". One textbook author holds that poetry is perhaps the most personally revealing of all types of writing. The same author holds that, even if it did not make clinicians, educators and researchers better diagnosticians or lecturers, a little experience in the art of poetry would probably help them all become better medical writers and maybe even better humans.
Where clinicians' poems are published
As of 2018, JAMA published a regular column titled "Poetry and Medicine", as did some other journals. Poems JAMA has published include "Lucky", "Superior Canal Dehiscence", "Neighborhood Playground" and, in 2016, "Autumnal Equinox", which begins "Today, calm and sunny, dry, / the sun slips equal to the coming night". As of 2018, the Annals of Internal Medicine offered a prize of $500 each year for the best poem it published, and the 2015 prize went to Lawrence J. Hergott for "Tragedy of Shadows".
Prose poems
Jodi-Ann Edwards, a physician, opens Overhead: "Code Blue at Nursing Station 2! Intubation!" on "It is personal. Protected how? Equipped how?" and builds it on a hospital's overhead calls during the COVID-19 pandemic, repeated between short fragments: fast losses, a touch of consolation barely there through layers of protection and fear, a loved one's grief at being apart, the donning of mask, shield, gown and gloves interleaved with talk of incoming patients and rounds, then orders, notes, a question about code status, another phone call and the spouse who is the proxy. Its turn is a death note written and rewritten: "Patient was a 65-year-old female with… Backspace. Patient was my colleague Backspace. Patient was my family Backspace. Patient was me." Its last stanza returns to the opening words, setting "Black. Face." between its questions until it ends on "Mask. I can't breathe." and one more overhead call. Its acknowledgment expresses appreciation of those who have lost patients, colleagues, friends and family during the pandemic and are finding the strength to carry on while sharing memories of their loved ones.
Edwards's shorter prose poem Mentorship Is a Sanctuary, written as a surgical research resident, is built on a three-part repetition. Two stanzas place her in a sanctuary, a bathroom stall and then a call room, where a lip-stained smile can be wiped and twisted or a powdered face peeled off and "blackness shown", with the questions "Nurse? Transporter? Doctor!? You?" in one and "Nurse? Transporter? Surgeon!? You?" in the other, and in each the hurt from others' words persists and she ends alone, questioning her worth internally. The third turns the refrain: mentorship is now the sanctuary, the questions become "Diversity? Allyship? Sponsorship?", her mentors' encouraging words inspire her to share them with whoever is where she has been, and the poem closes on "Academic Surgeon?! Absolutely. Me!"
Morgan Katz, a resident physician, builds a poem on a phrase from the electronic medical record. Its title, ".death", is an expandable dot phrase, which electronic medical records use for a frequently used note or phrase, and the poem opens on what she was told: that .death is the easiest note to write and the same for every patient, with no pulse, no spontaneous movement, no breath sounds and no sign of life, while the phone call is the hardest part, with its questions of how, when, why and whether it was painful. She asks whether she is allowed to say she is sorry, to someone who dropped their dad off without knowing it was goodbye, and whether doctors really do no harm when blood sticks and central lines hurt, and wonders whether dying alone may be easier because those left do not see the unimaginable end. She watches the patient's labs and chart, dreads looking at the suffering and turns her eyes from the agonal breathing, but sits a little longer to hold a hand so that the patient will not die alone. The poem closes on her asking whether .death will ever get easier and on her thought that maybe she wants the doctor to cry instead of typing .death without adding a single word.
Poems in rhymed stanzas
George Ongoro, a second-year medical student, writes Resonant Melodies of Healing: A Juneteenth Symphony in Medicine in eleven rhyming stanzas of two couplets each, in the voice of "a black man, a vessel strong" standing in "the hallowed halls of healing's grace". Its images are of art: the speaker as a symphony of compassion, medicine as a tapestry in which he wields a brush with empathy's hues, each patient's story a canvas. The middle stanzas turn to Juneteenth and to ancestors in the cotton fields whose resilience and voices proclaimed freedom, and the speaker carries their spirits as "A torchbearer for justice", "Their legacy guides, a beacon to see". The final stanzas speak of the poem itself, asking that it "transcend the earthly realm", and its last line has healing and Juneteenth intertwine.
Ongoro's Harmonies of Justice: Reflections on Virtue and Equality argues in rhymed quatrains. It opens on Aristotle's account of justice as giving each person what they truly deserve, and on his example of flutes, which go to the best player, a judgement the poem shares, and not by birth, beauty or colour. It then turns the principle on the poet's own position as a Black man punished for a skin he did not choose, widens to hospitals and schools where doctors of colour are rarely found, patients go without the care they need, enslavement's scars remain and injustice haunts students, and ends on a call for diversity in which patients and doctors are partners and equitable care is given a hand.