Body Language: Poems of the Medical Training Experience: Poems of the Medical Training Experience (BOA Anthology Series)

Poetry, without question, is a tricky thing. For many Americans it is an inapproachable art form that resides in a fortress guarded by elitist intellectuals. For the minority of Americans who read it, it is a personal thing--tough to define what works for some readers and tougher to understand for most. For the occasional reader of poetry, the favorite poem is usually something that sparks a familiar memory and puts it in perspective--a first love, the sight of the moon rising over a ridge in the mountains in the winter or the memory of a summer night in youth. For those of us that don't read much poetry it is the commonality of experience buried in the words speaking to something deep down inside of our common existence as humans that's tends to attract us to a poem.While the language in many of the poems in Body Language is striking, what draws the physician reader in more than anything else is the commonality of experiences inherent in these works. There are many remarkable landscapes in these poems, from the struggle to understand the intricate detail of the human body in anatomy class to the indelible memories of the manic patients or hopelessly depressed during psychiatry core clerkship. It is mostly all here, in the form of poetry, evoking those moments that most physicians have painfully internalized or stepped around or ignored for the lack of time to pay any attention to. For some these things have become shadows and for others scars and for many, things they just never understood very well to begin with and don't want to think about much any more. These are poems about all physicians as much as they are about those of the physician poets that wrote them. This book brings important experiences back, whether sadly, bluntly, humorously or subtly, in a way that reminds physicians of all the things they've been blessed and cursed to see and be part of.Body Language was the "brain child" of Neeta Jain, currently an R3 at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, when she was still a medical student at University of Rochester School of Medicine. She collaborated with another medical student at Yale University, Dagan Coppock with the support of her U of Rochester faculty advisor, Stephanie Brown Clark. While still 4th year medical students, Neeta and Dagan solicited submissions from students, residents and attending physicians from across the United States, receiving hundreds of submissions. Ultimately they culled out around 90 poems to create this anthology.Perhaps I am cynical or perhaps I just don't really believe that given the frantic nature of modern medicine, that there are many doctors that can devote the time to polishing their poetry in the tradition of William Carlos Williams, a New Jersey General Practitioner who practiced prior to the era of information overload. Williams wrote on a typewriter in between patients, during the time doctors now reserve for looking up a question, returning a phone call or answering an old email.But I was wrong. I came home from work exhausted one recent evening and picked up the book to discover another world, however familiar that world was. In that world are poems that occasionally jump off the page. Many of these poems are written by serious poets, poets published long before this book came along, and some are written by relative novices. But what unites these poems is the power--the raw emotion--of so many of the experiences described. We're reminded of overwhelming fatigue so harsh one envies the dead or the mundane call to pronounce a patient's death before fading back into the halls of the hospital. It is all here, experiences in training and in the practice of medicine.The anthology is divided into six sections:Medical student, first year; Medical student, second year; Medical student, clinical years; Intern; Resident; Attending. It is almost impossible not to find a situation or emotion in a poem in each section that all physicians have experienced at some point in their lives. For example, life that occasionally interjects itself into the mind numbing lecture hall of our pre-clinical years of medical school (Richard M. Berlin):Medical School LoversOne morning, while disease-slides flashedand filled the lecture room with twilight blue,the back door opened a sliver of lightand they entered holding hands.A few of us turned, then the others,four hundred eyes focusedon the couple at the door,faces still flushed from making love,their pleasure so certain.The slides flashed onand the lecturer persistedbut we were gone for the day,Still dazed by the way love can enterour lives in a flash of light,spinning our heads as we strugglewith lessons everyone learns in the dark.And for residents, the "soft" admit in the night (Mindy Shah):MAOIt's what we calla "soft" admit,which meansyour illness does notimpress us.Here is your room,the toilet, your bagof personal belongings.The toothbrush ison us.We'll round at seven,but I can tellby the smell of your breathyou're going to live.To summarize, after reading this book cover to cover, I was not surprised to learn that Garrison Keillor had picked up a copy and had asked permission to read some of its contents on his radio show--Writer's Almanac. It is great stuff that speaks about many of the things doctors have been through that they're too tired or too busy or too afraid to stop and ponder over the years of practicing medicine. I highly recommend the anthology and congratulate Neeta Jain and her co-editors on a tremendous achievement.Stolen Kisses (by Emily Osborn)The fresh-laundered smellof a boy's shirtstartles meleaning closerwith my stethoscopeI pretend to hear a murmursoak in the odorof a kiss

Just to preface the fact that this review is a little biased, I am one of the writers who contributed to this book.However I do think that I can speak for what I thought of the collection as a whole. This project has been in the works for a number of years now, and I have been eagerly awaiting it coming out.Since getting the book, I have been amazed at the depth and breadth of the poems contained in this anthology. I have found some of them heartwarming and some of them frankly disturbing, but they all evoked something from me, and that I find to be valuable.I loved that these poems address the training experience from different viewpoints. Many of the poems contained within are from the mind and heart of the medical students, physicians, etc, while another group comes from inside the patient's soul. It is this complex interaction developing between the poems that I have found to be the most intriguing to me.I hope to have the opportunity to hear more from the voices of my fellow poets in the medical field.