Becoming a Living Poem (Why Making Doctors Read Poetry Is Not Enough)
Dillon Stull, MD(c), Stanford University School of Medicine and MA, Duke Divinity School
Some attempts to “humanize” the practice of medicine today include proposals to educate medical professionals in the humanities, hence the growing field of the “medical humanities.” This paper will assert not that these suggestions are misguided but that they do not go far enough—and cannot go far enough—to prepare medical professionals to attend to the suffering of others with the compassion that each patient deserves.
This paper will examine poetry as a case study for the relationship between medicine and the humanities, a relationship that will become most clear and profound when the two are united and animated by religion.
A few features distinguish poetry as a literary form. Classically, these features include form and meter. The poem also tends to invite rumination, an act of reflection. Finally, poetry aims to communicate with few words living realities that surpass the strict descriptions of its language. It is not and has not been unusual to find physicians who simultaneously are poets or at least who read or enjoy poetry. But should all physicians be required to study poetry as a component of their professional formation?
Studying poetry may indeed form medical professionals into more humane caretakers for the sick, but it is not enough. Patients will benefit to the degree that physicians learn to embody the lessons of poetry—or better: when physicians learn to become living poems. These are medical professionals whose vitality is channeled by virtuous habits and humble prayer; whose care for the sick invites fruitful reflection on life, death, and pain; whose totality directs the gaze of others toward God, the living reality that surpasses the strict negotiations of daily life. Religion uniquely weds the poem and the practitioner of medicine by animating them within a worshipping community and by ordering them toward the highest end and ultimate aim of human existence.
Poetry and the rest of the medical humanities have many riches to lend the medical profession. Nevertheless, until medical professionals learn to wholly inhabit the wisdom of these arts, there will be something lacking in our response to the suffering other.
This paper will examine poetry as a case study for the relationship between medicine and the humanities, a relationship that will become most clear and profound when the two are united and animated by religion.
A few features distinguish poetry as a literary form. Classically, these features include form and meter. The poem also tends to invite rumination, an act of reflection. Finally, poetry aims to communicate with few words living realities that surpass the strict descriptions of its language. It is not and has not been unusual to find physicians who simultaneously are poets or at least who read or enjoy poetry. But should all physicians be required to study poetry as a component of their professional formation?
Studying poetry may indeed form medical professionals into more humane caretakers for the sick, but it is not enough. Patients will benefit to the degree that physicians learn to embody the lessons of poetry—or better: when physicians learn to become living poems. These are medical professionals whose vitality is channeled by virtuous habits and humble prayer; whose care for the sick invites fruitful reflection on life, death, and pain; whose totality directs the gaze of others toward God, the living reality that surpasses the strict negotiations of daily life. Religion uniquely weds the poem and the practitioner of medicine by animating them within a worshipping community and by ordering them toward the highest end and ultimate aim of human existence.
Poetry and the rest of the medical humanities have many riches to lend the medical profession. Nevertheless, until medical professionals learn to wholly inhabit the wisdom of these arts, there will be something lacking in our response to the suffering other.