Finding Poetry, and Ourselves, in Medicine

What do we seek in medicine? Simply “to do no harm,” as promised when taking the Hippocratic oath? Surely diagnosis and treatment of illness are central to doctoring, but what about earning a good living or professional prestige? Or do we aspire to something loftier, akin to the mission statement of the American Medical Association: “To promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health”? Or perhaps, from an even broader perspective, one that insists clinicians and patients are equally human, what matters most in medicine is our shared stories, as the poet Mark Doty observed at a symposium on poetry and healing. “Late Night Encounter at the Children’s Hospital’s ICU” expresses just such a humanizing narrative. The title provides the familiar setting, where the “encounter” first seems to refer to the speaker helping another grieving parent find a lost phone. As the poem unfolds through its seemingly unremarkable lists, first of places searched, and then, more suggestively, of the indelible contents of a “lost and found box” at the unit attendant’s desk, “…a stuffed dog missing a leg./Plastic necklaces, a bag of Skittles,/diamond stud earring, a Movado watch./A sequined purse, a money clip thick with cash,” we find our own search for existential meaning. The poem’s devastatingly clear conclusion demonstrates that what we finally discover in our work with the afflicted is our own uncannily commingled and yet somehow unbound suffering: “Kinda funny,/isn’t it? Some people lose everything here.”