Published in
The Journal of the American Medical Association, American Medical Association
Content
Medicine thrives at the intersection of art and science. Yet sometimes clinicians can feel split into separate halves, one openhearted and the other laser focused, as they are drawn in both directions. Poetry about illness may help us to reintegrate, guiding clinicians and patients alike to learn how the other experiences the threats to health that bring us together. The poem “Hemianopsia” begins with a firmly medically oriented title, a term familiar to many physicians, that becomes a metaphor for how we see and ultimately understand any diagnosis with both sides of our brains. Although “Hemianopsia” allows a clinical reader to call to mind pithy diagnostic pearls or well-described pathognomonic findings, the speaker (perhaps a clinician himself?) goes on to express the equally compelling, but rarely told, experience of actually living with a hemianopsia. Using vivid imagery, the poem presents 2 halves of a joint perspective, both what stands out objectively in the surroundings (“sectioned clinical”) and that which is also subjectively imagined (“star-drained sky”). By showing both what is seen and unseen, each in a symbolically discrete sestet, we perceive the whole picture as the speaker synthesizes a transfigured field of vision. Similarly, through patients, we are privileged to be able to experience a diagnosis beyond a stark list of guideline criteria, but also through evocative histories and stories. Through this example in poetry, we ironically see our own partial blindness while wondering at all we can know together.
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