Literature & Medicine Humanities at the Heart of Health Care®
Synapse ::: Spring 2004 ::: Volume I, Number I
Literature & Medicine: From the Inside
Out
Interview with Rafael Campo
by Ingrid Ahlgren
On October 3, 2002, poet, essayist and physician Rafael Campo read his poetry and prose to help kick off Rhode Island Council for the Humanities’ new program, Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Healthcare. Program officer Ingrid Ahlgren caught up with him afterward.
“The most important thing we can give is our
hearts”
An Interview with Rafael Campo
IA: How does your writing relate to your work as a physician?
RC: Really my work as a doctor and poet are inextricably interrelated in my imagination. I can’t imagine doing one without the other. Empathy is so central to both types of work. Poetry really is a version of another voice, is the story or the narrative of another person or the speaker. Similarly, in medicine, you have to be able to enter into the stories of your patients and to listen carefully to what they tell you about their symptoms. So those two things to me are very parallel activities. I think poetry enriches my work as a doctor. I hope it improves my ability to listen to patients’ stories, but it also helps with related issues such as multicultural matters. And it helps with the frustration that at times, when like many doctors, I feel my time with patients is limited due to managed care.
IA: How do you think health care professionals can benefit from literature?
RC: In so many ways. Poetry can be tremendously useful in thinking about cross-cultural issues. We can read a poem by, let’s say, Audre Lorde, about her experience of being an African American and a lesbian woman with few resources diagnosed with breast cancer, and we really begin to fathom how that experience of illness is quite different than perhaps the experience of an affluent white woman living in the suburbs of Boston or Providence. Poetry can give us invaluable information about some of the specific kinds of problems our very diverse patients might encounter as they try to get well. So I think that’s one practical use of it. Another one is this issue of expanding the opportunities for interacting with patients.
When I can connect with a patient through poetry, it makes that fifteen minute visit that I wish were an hour long seem more ample, more accommodating. I can certainly, through written materials, engage my patients outside of the office and connect with them. I think the message to them when we share poetry is my hearing them and viewing them as full, integrated people, not just as patients with hypertension or AIDS or breast cancer, that I’m really interested in knowing them as whole people. In that way, it’s a wonderful kind of antidote to the frustrations of managed care. Another thing I want to say, too, is that in medicine we are confronted with this tremendous array of technology. We’re very fortunate to have that gift, if you will, to bring to our patients, but there are times when I think it is important to be able to reach out to patients and touch one another in ways that cold technology and machines don’t permit. And often there’s a way to share a poem at the bedside with the family of a patient who is intubated and can’t speak to us at all; they’re feeling crowded out by all these machines and buzzers and IV poles, and that poem creates a space for us to see each other as people and, in some sense, maybe gives a voice to that patient. As much as those machines may be helping, they are also perhaps getting in the way of that voice.
IA: You’ve referred to some of your early poems as “ER poems.” How do you think your poetry has evolved since you first started writing?
RC: I hope that it’s more attentive to the stories of my patients. I really like to think of poetry as kind of a complementary narrative. I remember a time in my writing when I was thinking about patients more as their collection of symptoms or their diagnosis or perhaps even their racial or sexual identity. Rather than compartmentalizing, I hope my poetry is again harkening to their story of the illness, not the one that I impose as a doctor with all my medical lingo and all my ER language. I’m hoping now that my poems embrace what I think of as the primary narrative of illness, which is the one that comes from the patients, the story that they want to tell us about what they’re feeling, about how they’re coping, about what their symptoms are. Not our explanation of those things, but what they’re actually telling us about them. I’m trying to reflect those narratives back in my poems, or perhaps elevate them to the same visibility or the importance as we assign to the biomedical narrative which is all about x-ray reports, biopsy results, sodium and potassium levels. I wanted to dignify and honor them.
IA: In addition to being a poet, you are also a noted essayist. Do certain subjects tend to lend themselves more to one genre or another?
RC: Poetry lends itself to more visceral kinds of experiences than perhaps does prose, probably because poetry so physically embodies some of the same rhythms that I hear through the stethoscope all day long listening to my patients’ hearts beating or lungs breathing. Those rhythms are really so present in poetry. So I think those kinds of experiences of the body, whether they are the illness experience, let’s say, or even the experience of erotic love or the experience of pain. These are physical kinds of experience, and I think they are especially well addressed by poetry. Prose, at least in my estimation, tends to be more useful for sorting out some of the more cognitive problems of medical work.
IA: What are some of your favorite books?
RC: Where should I begin? If I were thinking of favorite books of poetry I would say Marilyn Hacker, several books of hers that I love. I would include among those her book Winter Numbers. Another poet by the name of Thom Gunn, who has written about the AIDS epidemic in The Man with Night Sweats. Audre Lorde’s book The Cancer Journals, about her experiences of breast cancer. That’s an incredibly powerful book. There’s a book by a poet by the name of Lucia Perillo called The Body Mutinies which is largely about living with multiple sclerosis. In terms of prose writing, Nancy Mairs. She has a wonderful book called Waist-High in the World. She happens also to be a writer with MS and writes incredibly eloquently not just about her experiences with MS, but also issues of spirituality. Reynolds Price has a beautiful book called A Whole New Life. He’s a novelist who was diagnosed with spinal cancer, and he writes about not only how he confronted his diagnosis, but also about living his life after treatment without being able to walk any longer. One more I maybe should mention is a memoir by a poet by the name of Mark Doty. Heaven’s Coast. It’s a beautiful book about caring for someone who is dying. It’s such an important story about HIV and AIDS, but it’s also about human mortality.
IA: Tell me more about your forthcoming book, The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Favorite Poems, which is due to come out in the fall of 2003.
RC: It will be published by W.W. Norton in the fall of 2003, and it’s a book that I hope can be of use to physicians in particular who are interested in this area. It’s essays about some of the poems that I was just talking about, and how I respond to these poems as a physician-poet, and also how I’ve made use of them in my relationships with patients. This book is a testimony, if you will, to the healing power of poetry.
IA: Where do you see your writing going in the future, and how do think it will continue to connect to your medical work?
RC: There are so many stories in medicine, so many narratives that need to be heard. We’re so privileged in medicine to witness some of the most critical and life changing events in peoples’ lives. I hope that, as I continue to write, I’ll be able to give voice to more of those essentially humane narratives. And I hope that in the future more and more care providers, look to poetry as a way to help make sense of their work to care for people who are suffering. As powerful as medicine is, with all our technologies and our treatments, I think the most important thing we can give is our hearts, by being empathetic and compassionate care providers.
Editor’s note: this article originally appeared in RICHviews, Winter 2003 and has been reprinted here with the permission of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities.