Poetry & Medicine, part II.

“I could prescribe any of a dozen antibiotics to cure
endocarditis, or even a thrombolytic agent
to stave off a heart attack; but what I
yearned for was the elixir of poetry,
which could heal the otherwise
untreatable condition of
my broken heart.”

This quote, by poet and physician Rafael Campo*,
beautifully captures the essence of the union
between the arts…and the art of medicine.

•

Therefore, today I will let him speak for me. 
This is from his poem What the Body Told:

“To somewhere distant in my heart, they cry.
I look inside their other-person’s mouths
And see the wet interior of souls.
It’s warm and red in there–like love, with teeth.
I’ve studied medicine until I cried.”

*Rafael Campo is an internal medicine physician and poet currently on faculty at Harvard.