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Friday, January 02, 2004... "curing and healing are not the same, and it is possible to achieve the latter without succeeding in the former." ...Narrative provides more than a bridge between patient and doctor; it is also a diagnostic and therapeutic tool. Carried in the black bag, it is part of the physical examination, an internal ultrasound. Campo writes that "poetry locates us inside the experience of illness, demanding that we consider it from within, as attentively as we do from without." It's part of the art of medicine to listen and, more importantly, to hear, our patient's stories. Not everyone is able to write down their stories or express themselves through poetry, but everyone has a story to tell if we only take the time to hear it. Many times that story is the most important part of the medical encounter. Unfortunately, it's often the first to fall by the wayside in the press of time. (For more on Campos's approach to mixing poetry and medicine, click here.) The other book is an example of the practical application of Dr. Campos's approach. Breathing for a Living: A Memoir, is the very personal story of a young woman's life with cystic fibrosis. (See NEJM review here.) The author explicitly acknowledges the role of poetry in dealing with her illness, citing her physician father's habit of reading poetry to her when she lay sick in the hospital. She opens with one of those poems: I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. Cystic fibrosis shortens young lives. It robs its victims of that illusion of immortality that makes young adulthood so exhilirating. And judging from the samples of the book available at Amazon.com, this book successfully conveys what it's like to come to terms with that mortality. posted by Sydney on 1/02/2004 07:50:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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