A Setback: In Memory of John Stone, 1936–2008

John Stone died in Atlanta, Georgia, early on Thursday, November 6, 2008. Poet and cardiologist, he was also a Mozart-lover, director of one of the first emergency medicine residencies, and for many years, Associate Dean of Admissions at Emory University Medical School. To hear him read his poems was a treat—in part because, in the southern tradition, he was a good storyteller, but mostly because he was a good poet.

The poems are beautifully simple and direct, and yet, as with all good literature, when you reread them or compare your interpretation with others', you discover more and more about them. They unfold; they last. On reading "To a Fourteen-Year-Old Girl in Labor and Delivery"¹ or "Death,"² non-native speakers and medical students (and sometimes those who are both at once), who thought they didn't like poetry, discover that not only can they understand the stuff, but they like it a lot.

Once in the 1980s, with a twelve-minute slot on a humanities panel at the American College of Surgeons' Clinical Congress—an immense meeting in the cavernous Moscone Center in San Francisco—I read "Talking to the Family" to a packed room: three hundred surgeons in folding chairs, another 40 or 50 on the floor in the aisles. When I finished, there was perfect, motionless, pin-drop silence. Afterward, a small mob, more than two dozen surgeons, wanted to know where they could find a copy of that poem. Here it is:

Talking to the Family

My white coat waits in the cornerlike a father.I will wear it to meet the sisterin her white shoes and organza dressin the live of winter, the milkless husbandholding the baby.

I will tell them.

They will put it togetherand take it apart.Their voices will buzz.The cut ends of their nerveswill curl.

I will take off the coat,drive home,and replace the light bulb in the hall³

We hear the striking images, that unforgettable phrase "the milkless husband," and feel the thud of the periods that suddenly goes missing from the last line. Still, the secret of the poem, the reason its speaker is not the heartless bastard a first-year student every now and then will argue he must be, is that, except for the first line, it is written in the future tense. Prolepsis, if you want to get technical about it. The dreadful telling has not happened yet. The speaker is still elsewhere, off stage, in his office perhaps, and the dread—along with the acceptance of a physician's duty—is his.

John wrote about many things, wonderful daily things: playing soccer with his sons, watching them sleep, teaching, observing pigeons (eight sonnets!), an eclipse, a dog's death, a spider web. He wrote essays, too, collected in In the Country of Hearts. Above all, he was the poet of everyday doctoring: missing a patient who no longer comes to clinic appointments, growing to hate the ring of the telephone, making a house call only to discover what medicine is all about. His narrator, as in "Talking to the Family," often occupies a middle place between the patient or the grieving family and the ordinary world the rest of us inhabit. You can find it in "Looking Down into a Ditch"⁴ and in "He Makes a House Call,"⁵ but it's made most explicit in "The Girl in the Hall." The speaker, coming up from an emergency amputation, imagines the horror of the patient's building-site accident "like Harold Lloyd holding on / at half past five," and encounters the girl "with the Mickey Mouse / watch. . . :"

She asks.I say I'm fine. She has her clocks.He, his.I, mine.⁶

Not even that occasional first-year student could think the doctor is fine.

And yet he rejoiced. By now "Gaudeamus Igitur: A Valediction"⁷ has been recited at more medical school commencements—by others as well as by John, invited for the purpose—than any other poem. "Christmas...