Poetry is powerful healer for both medic and patient

There’s a growing body of evidence in the medical scientific literature to support the use of poetry and the arts in clinical practice – to enhance empathy, communication skills, and both patient and clinician wellbeing. As a medic, it took me a while to appreciate this.

In school, I loved English poetry, and after doing the Leaving Cert I went to UCD to study pure English. It’s what I wanted most in the world to do.

Three years later, however, I had begun to feel that poetry and fiction, although enjoyable to indulge in, had very little to do with real life. To emphasise the point, when I smashed my leg playing soccer, it was orthopaedics, not literature that got me back on my feet again.

My disillusionment with poetry was complete. So, I switched to medicine. It was science, not poetry for me from now on.

Una Mullally: Reaction to Sligo killings highlights a collective maturity

---

‘And who might you be?’ – John Horgan on John A Murphy

---

The Irish Times view on the public sector pay talks: trying to strike the right balance

---

Student grants should be extended to squeezed middle

---

Patients were less predictable than it said in the medical textbooks and scientific journals

A few years after I qualified as a doctor, while attending a medical conference in Italy, I happened to bump into Sir Alec Guinness who was staying in the same hotel. I’d seen most of the films he’d been in; he was easy to chat to, and generous with his time.

Over a few wide-ranging conversations (I skipped some of the conference sessions to meet him), one of the things he said to me was that an interest in the humanities would make me a better doctor: more in touch with emotions (patients’, mine), more compassionate, more observant, more able to unwind. This advice had a profound effect on the rest of my career.

Ten years on hospital wards and in out-patient departments as a medical student and doctor had taught me that medicine hadn’t all the answers. Patients were less predictable than it said in the medical textbooks and scientific journals. Sometimes, I found it hard to connect with them.

Being objective and empathetic was a difficult balancing act. My job could also make me feel incredibly happy and put me through the emotional wringer at a moment’s notice. I needed something extra to hang on to. It was time to put the baby back in the bathwater.

Nuance and signs

My go-to person was Sylvia Plath whose poetry I had once studied for my BA. I was now a registrar in obstetrics. Plath’s poems made more sense to me now: her voice, her thoughts, the intensity of her emotions.

Reading Plath taught me to listen more attentively, to look more carefully for nuances and hidden signs, to be more emotionally intelligent as a doctor. Plath’s poetry also introduced me to new poets.

Reading a beautiful poem in a dingy on-call room was a wonderful way to recharge my batteries at the end of a long day. Bit by bit, I also started to write poetry.

One of the leading exponents of the use of poetry in clinical practice is Harvard physician and poet Dr Rafael Campo, who is also poetry editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Campo encourages clinicians and patients to read and write poetry about their experiences as an antidote to a mechanistic model of medicine

Campo encourages clinicians and patients to read and write poetry about their experiences as an antidote to a mechanistic model of medicine “where all the mysteries of our humanity are explained by deciphering the human genome [and] where we have billion-dollar pharmaceuticals for even the soul’s ailments”.

Campo emphasises the need for doctors not to remove themselves from the experiences of their patients and not to solely focus on “the heartless, purely fact-based narratives we record in their charts”. Medicine must aim to heal; it cannot always cure. Poetry and the arts can contribute to the healing process.

Fear of infection

By the time Covid arrived, I was writing poetry more consistently. I wrote in short bursts on my phone – before going to bed, first thing in the morning, at break times. Some of what I wrote during Covid related to my job – but most of it didn’t.

Everyone’s experience of Covid was both unique and similar: fear of infection (especially before the vaccines arrived), social isolation, nostalgia for crowded events (concerts, football matches), concern for elderly parents and relatives, the joy of nature, memories of (and longings for) holidays abroad, Christmas on Zoom, Netflix, the incessant Covid newsfeed.

I also began to imagine what it was like to be other people – patients in ICU, the elderly in nursing homes, people who couldn’t fully understand what was happening to them.

“In time, we will need poets and writers of the imagination to look through the looking glass – and tell us the stories of this strange, upside-down world. We will need more than a vaccine and a rebooted economy to heal us.” I wrote this in April 2020 in this newspaper.

Writing poetry has helped me to deal with what has happened. Poetry has also helped me to find the right words when I needed them – an essential skill in clinical practice.

My brother died in October 2021. He was a fanatical Liverpool supporter. When he was dying, and medicine had very little to offer, Jürgen Klopp wrote a letter to him that said “You’ll never walk alone.” For my brother, a teacher of Leaving Cert English, the letter was like a poem; it had all the right words. For me, “You’ll never walk alone” summed up in a line what poems can do.

Chris Fitzpatrick is clinical lead for Covid-19 vaccinations in the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group and a clinical professor in UCD. Poetic Licence in a Time of Corona is his first collection of poetry and will be published on May 12th by Twenty-First Century Renaissance