Poetry - Body Language: Poems of the Medical Training Experience

Poetry - Medical Title: Body Language: Poems of the Medical Training Experience Author: Neeta Jain (Editor), Dagan Coppock (Editor), Stephanie Brown Clark (Editor) Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. Reviewed by: Lynn Peterson | View Bio

Reading “Body Language” brings the reader into a world that is completely unfamiliar to most of us, the world of medicine. It's a compilation of poetry written entirely by doctors. The poems explore their world, a world of sixteen hour days, catheters, and mental patients. While this world is unfamiliar to me, except occasionally as a patient or family of a patient, these poems bring me right into the action. I feel like I am an intern working a sixteen-hour day who has not seen my mother in months.

The poems are magical in that they explore something wholly different from our day-to-day experiences. The subjects of these poems are not flowers or beautiful women; they are the gritty truths of life as a doctor, and they bring the reader right into that OR. The doctors write of unfamiliar or even scary subjects in a way that speaks to universal human truths and emotions. They explore love, loss, death, relationships, exhaustion, and aging, all things that are a part of our day-to-day lives.

The beauty of this compilation is that it brings the world of the young doctor, the intern, to life in a way I've only before seen on television. These doctors, masters of the scalpel, are also masters of the pen.

About the Author

Stephanie Brown Clark received her MA in English Literature from the University of Western Ontario, with an MD from McMaster University. She completed her PhD in medical history and English Literature at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in 1998, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Division of Medical Humanities at the University of Rochester Medical Centre.