Poetry and Medicine

            After attending the Poetry Competition organized by students of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) on Friday December 22, 2006, I developed a strong urge to propose to the concerned authorities of Tribhuvan University that they consider including poetry somewhere in the medical curricula. To some grey hairs, such a proposal might sound preposterous. However, to me this notion carried the weight of personal conviction because I had witnessed the zeal of medical students for poetic expressions, their capacity to relish poetry as pleasing and meaningful sound, and, above all, their ability to express their noble sentiments in a richly original and personal poetic language. This opened my eyes to the relationship between poetry and medicine.

            Earlier, I had explored the use of mathematics in literature in “The Numerical Rhizome” and noted the balance and symmetry of equations in both these fields that yielded aesthetic delights to the human mind. Now, I had begun to sense some sort of moral and humane relationship between medicine and poetry. Here was an area to explore.

            My mind went back to the year 1959 when my father, a terminally ill cancer patient, lay on a wooden bed in a small shed inside the precinct of Hare Ram Kunja. It was around this time that Dom Moraes wanted to meet him. We have a recollection of this meeting in Gone Away: An Indian Journal written by this poet of Indian origin. Devkota wanted to listen to the young man’s poetry even as he suffered the conflagration within his bowels. To some extent, poetry, which was his passion, helped him take his mind away from pain.

            I am sure that there are many other instances where a ward patient has found at least momentary relief from pain or depression through poetry. Poetry is not a mere luxury for those who can afford it; it is a sharing of joys and sorrows, of visions and fears, of life-truths that imagination fishes out of existence. Poetry makes a very powerful use of language. The impact of its brevity, its suggestion and its felt truth upon the heart leaves a lasting impression that is capable of changing attitudes and behaviour. Its rhythm can change a mood, its chanted repetitions can alleviate if not actually heal ailments of psychosomatic origin, its coded truth, acting as precedent, can ease the burden of a terminally ill patient or a chronic sufferer of some malaise who shares a similar condition.

Often, it is not only the terminally ill patient but also the disabled, the sick or the depressed that benefits from other people’s experience. It is easy to imagine the relief experienced by people who have just learned of their metabolic disorder when other diabetic patients, for example, tell them how they have learned to live with it for the last five or ten years. Such sharing can quite naturally strike a friendly relationship between such people on the basis of their similar physical condition. The blind and the deaf share their respective forums. The AIDS patient is consoled by the fact that s/he is not the sole person to suffer this condition. We alleviate our own suffering by sharing it with others and we alleviate the suffering of others by lovingly listening to what they have to say to us. This is why there is a whole category of literature of the disabled which has found a place in university curricula all over the world.

I need not repeat here that poetry, art and music have their own therapeutic values. Poetry is that chemical of the soul that can be blended with noble and enlightened feelings in the beaker of the heart where life constantly flows in and out. It is then linguistically encapsulated in its generic literary form. Diagnosis of an ailment relies more on the head than on the heart. Physics observes and decides even as chemistry cures. Diagnosis is a processing of empirical data in the head. The cure functions so subtly that physicians have to rely on its apparent symptoms to understand its inferred intracellular processes, which may even then be obscure to them. Poetry, too, works in subtle and invisible ways to nourish human sensibilities. Our fickle sensibilities are often benumbed and dehydrated, so to say, by force of habit, by repeated invasions of the ugly and the bad, and by uncritical ingestion of too much of general lies that float as rumuors in the public atmosphere.

What we all need is a regular re-invigoration of our sensibility. This is even more so especially in violent times like ours when uneducated responses to frustrations defy the sanctity of human life itself. On a more practical level, medical practitioners and, on a more spiritual level, poets are sworn into the promotion of life, not its destruction. Whenever the spirit and the act synchronize in the same individual, humankind wins yet another battle against the ugly and the bad. We have many battles to win.

And, what is the harm anyway if a course in the literature of the disabled, for instance, were offered in a curriculum for medicine? Do students of medicine have anything to lose by studying some literature that explains the physical, social, and psychological conditions of their patients? It will expose physicians to the perspectives of their patients and promote a better understanding that will lead to improved service of humanity.

Or, for that matter, a course in creative writing for students of medicine is not unimaginable. It can be offered as an optional paper for those that find it meaningful. After all, many medical practitioners all over the world have written poetry and other forms of literature. Some have even sacrificed their medical career and established themselves as excellent poets and writers. Humanity can be served in a hundred different ways, but poetry can be relished and produced by only those who keep alive the soothing flames of human sensibilities.

Thursday, December 28, 2006