Rafael Campo is a practicing physician at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and he is also known for his poetry. The following excerpt is from an interview with Campo by Cortney Davis(poets.org)
His thesis: “that caregiving and writing poetry shared the attributes of witnessing, healing, naming, and bringing about, if not cure, then wholeness.”
“What most patients seem to feel is most lacking in medicine these days is compassion, the sense that their doctors listen to them, that their own unique voices are heard—in short, that what I think of as their more “truthful” narratives matter. So to be a healer in the most meaningful sense, I think that of course one must be able to synthesize all those important facts and perform all those technical competencies but at the same time, be able to warm the hand of the patient dying in the ICU despite all the IVs and ventilator settings, or share the stories of a life well-lived at the hospice bedside when one more round of chemo isn’t going to help. I don’t want to live in a world where these two pursuits are pushed further and further apart, where all the mysteries of our humanity are explained by deciphering the human genome, where we have billion-dollar pharmaceuticals for even the soul’s ailments. As a humanist and a scientist, I think it’s a kind of hubris to even suggest we might someday “solve the problem” of human suffering. May we instead always honor—through art, through poetry, through music, through all our imaginative engagements with what is ultimately unknowable—the humanity of those who suffer! Here is where we must feel awe, and be humbled. Not by some rocket we send up into the air, or some drug that helps us live a little longer.”
Campos goes on to say, “Writing a poem to me is a sacred act. It is a moment of profound reverence for the mystery of our humanity, in all its unfathomable complexities, feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up as I realize what I am trying to do. It’s also an act of humility and service—another way it’s like healing—in which I give myself over to the power of narrative itself, the acknowledgment that no poem or story is owned by one person but instead belongs to us all. I don’t feel the fabled isolation of the creative act at all—alone, scrawling my lines out by candlelight, against the all-encompassing dark—but, on the contrary, am aware of all the possibilities for communion and sharing that poetry at its origins must have had. I want my poem to join me to “the other,” to satisfy not just a need in me to speak out, but also that need in another consciousness to recognize himself in another human being’s creation.”

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