On Writing Poetry and Studying Medicine

September 2024

People often look surprised when I tell them I write poems.

"But you want to be a doctor," they say, as if the two live in different universes.

I have come to believe they share the same address.

The Discipline of Attention

Both poetry and medicine begin with the same act: paying close attention.

A poet looks at a rice field at dusk and notices the way the light bends at the edges of each stalk. A physician looks at a patient's face and notices the slight asymmetry that might indicate a neurological event.

Both are trained observers. Both are looking for meaning in details that most people walk past.

When I study the layers of the skin — epidermis, dermis, hypodermis — I cannot help but think of how a poem also has layers. The surface meaning, the emotional meaning, the meaning that only arrives the third time you read it.

Language as Medicine

Words heal. This is not metaphor, or at least not only metaphor.

There is strong evidence now that the way a doctor communicates affects patient outcomes. A physician who explains clearly, listens deeply, and acknowledges pain — that physician is not just being polite. They are practicing a form of care that has measurable biological effects.

Placebo is one example. Connection is another.

The writers I admire most — Anton Chekhov, who was a doctor; William Carlos Williams, who delivered babies while writing poems — understood this. Their art and their medicine fed each other.

What Writing Has Taught Me for Medicine

Writing poetry has made me:

1. More precise with language — every word in a poem must earn its place, just as every diagnosis must be supported by evidence
2. More comfortable with ambiguity — poems often do not resolve neatly, and neither do many clinical cases
3. More empathetic — inhabiting characters and voices on the page makes it easier to inhabit a patient's perspective

What Medicine Has Taught Me for Writing

Studying biology and medicine has made me:

1. Grounded in the body — my poems are full of blood and bone and breath, not in a morbid way but in a living way
2. Aware of stakes — when you know what it costs a body to survive, every story becomes more urgent
3. Respectful of process — good medicine, like good writing, is never rushed

The pen and the stethoscope are not opposites. They are, I think, cousins — both trying to make invisible things visible.