Poetry as “Neuroscience”

Allusion is a common literary device, particularly prevalent in poetry, involving a deliberate, passing reference, usually to a literary work or writer, that deepens meaning. “Medical School” most directly alludes to the work of distinguished French poet and novelist Victor Hugo, perhaps best known as the author of Les Misérables. Through his allusion to Hugo, the speaker of the poem heightens its exquisite sensory details—the “perfume” of an old book compared with a list of other unmistakable smells—that deftly recall, in a poem that is also about memory, a line from his masterpiece: “Nothing awakens a reminiscence like an odor.” As the speaker of the poem is a physician reflecting on his experience as a medical student, the poem becomes more than a reminiscence, affording an opportunity for musing on the neuroscience of memory and its connection to olfaction. In another, more brief allusion, we are reminded not entirely unironically of the rhyming mnemonics many of us employed to help learn anatomy or the Krebs cycle. In yet another layer of nuanced meaning, by having invoked Hugo, who himself frequently alluded to science and industrialization in his work (including, of course, in Les Misérables), and not to mention (ever so faintly) the poet-surgeon John Keats, the poem ultimately celebrates how art and science inform one another—and that indeed, art, especially poetry, can exalt the toil of medicine, through “…the music in the urn, …treasure maps that were the treasure,/My effort effortlessly passing into joy.”