The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry (review)

Midway through The Great Gatsby, it occurs to Nick Carraway that "there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well."¹ This assertion captures one of the core issues for medicine: communication and understanding between health-care providers and patients occur between people experiencing life in deeply different ways. Poetry, according to Rafael Campo in his book The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry, is a perfect bridge for spanning this divide.

As a poet, essayist, and internist, Campo argues fervently and eloquently that poetry has an important medical role as well as a humanistic one. Poetry, he asserts, provides "an expressive medium in language capacious enough to make empathy for human suffering, if not entirely comprehensible, then at least clearly and palpably evident" (187). His arguments for the introduction of poetry into clinical practice are sound, grounded first in the historical role poetry has played in the healing arts throughout the world and then in the expansive opportunities for expression and the physiological pulsing of poetry itself. As he says, poetry is a "wellspring for fresh metaphors that reconsider illness in radically new ways" (93), with "literally heart-thumping language" (19).

The chapters, as their titles suggest, mark a progression from "Inklings" and "Symptoms" through "End of Life" and "Transcendence," but the book as a whole belies a simplistic narrative trajectory. By way of a superb selection of poems, including gems from Mark Doty, Tory Dent, Lucia Perillo, Audre Lorde, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, and physician-poet Alice Jones, and in revelatory anecdotes around patient encounters, Campo fleshes out a comprehensive call for a relationship between patient and physician based not just on the pragmatic imperatives of time, money, and scientific intervention, each of which tends to widen the divide between the health-care providers and the sick, but based also on a vigilant parsing of each person's experience as a patient. Poetry is not just the medium, then, but also the model.

The twin triumphs of this book are the poems Campo has chosen and his elegant readings of them. With the exception of a scathing reevaluation of a William Carlos Williams poem (a reading that seems unduly harsh), his interpretations are rich and generous, closely guided by the words and rhythms of the selected poems. In particular, his masterful analysis of enjambment doubly serves to remind us of the value of a poet's own expertise when reading poetry, as well as why poets hit the return key when they do.

But given that his book is a convincing case for sharing poetry with patients, how does one go about doing so? Campo provides little specific guidance here. In medical terms, how are poems dosed and prescribed? And what steps must be taken before doing so? Presumably one should carefully measure the patient's literacy, have a sense of the patient's education and of his or her willingness to be an active participant in reading. But I wonder whether some poetry advocates suitably evaluate and prep their patients (or residents or medical students) before springing verse on them. When does one read a poem aloud and when does the physician discuss it with the patient? In other words, what sort of follow-up is needed? Campo has imported an anachronism into the subtitle—the doctor's black bag. The black bag not only invokes a sentimental image of the benevolent doctor but also reminds us that poems are low-tech, portable tools that a doctor can tuck alongside a stethoscope and reflex hammer and bring wherever he or she goes. But as anybody who has seen children playing with fat plastic replicas of stethoscopes and reflex hammers knows, those instruments require some skill to use and an ability to interpret the results: it is not just child's play. Perhaps this book will encourage those who...