Medicine Is Heard, Poetry Is Overheard

John Stuart Mill, a British philosopher, economist, and foundational political thinker, famously remarked in his 1833 essay “What Is Poetry?” that “rhetoric is heard; poetry is overheard.” Mill had a deep, abiding interest in poetry after encountering William Wordsworth’s life-sustaining work during a period of depression he experienced in his youth; he also wrote extensively about science and particularly the scientific method. The eerie quality of poetry as overheard, capable of revealing something we might intuit but cannot articulate, is at once playfully yet harrowingly animated in “Losing Sight.” The poem’s speaker, elated by his newfound technical prowess in diagnosing a retinal detachment, is overheard by a patient as he describes what he’s seen to a physician colleague. The ironies around perception conveyed by this poetic overhearing are several: the detachment’s symptoms, like a “black curtain” falling across the field of vision, blind the patient just as the speaker is blinded to his own insensitivity by the emergency department bay’s curtain obscuring him from view; the diagnosis itself, suggesting not just retinal pathology but also the detachment that disconnects the physician from his patient’s distress; the speaker’s very ability to see so clearly the detachment while the patient’s vision has become severely impaired. “So cool,” his colleague exclaims, the speaker’s double-edged “pride” buoying him—when from the curtain’s other side booms the contrasting voice of the patient, reminding us that whatever power physicians possess it must always serve those who seek our care, “NOT cool!” Poetry, perhaps less spectacular than medical science, still humbles us.