Wednesday, Aug 20, 2008
A Harvard physician believes poetry can soothe and even heal his patients.
Dec 8, 1999 | My patient seemed skeptical at first. "What am I going to do with that?" she asked as she stared at the cover of Marilyn Hacker's book of poems "Winter Numbers," with its image of ripe pears, full as a woman's breasts, tangled in blood-red yarn. I have shared this book -- and others, like Audre Lorde's "The Cancer Journals" and Alicia Ostriker's "The Crack in Everything" -- with other patients of mine who are newly diagnosed with breast cancer.
"To survive/my body stops dreaming it's twenty-five," ends one of Hacker's most devastating poems. For a long moment, I too questioned whether words could heal.
But in responding to that poem's killer couplet, in grappling with its blend of resignation and persistence, I felt the unique power of poetry. Aside from finding an alternative to the sea of medicalese in which she was about to be immersed, aside from finding answers to questions she might not dare ask her overworked and/or imperious physicians, aside from the breaking of her own heart in each carefully rendered line break, I knew that in poetry my patient would discover courage, comfort and, ultimately, precious wisdom.
Elizabeth, as I'll call her, proved more resistant to the healing power of language than most of the patients with whom I have tried to share poetry.
"Look," she said, "I appreciate you trying to show you care. But I want you and all my doctors to know what to do about my medical condition, and not my feelings." I noticed how the rim of tears forming in her blue eyes seemed to magnify their beauty. "So you can keep this." Abruptly, she ended our encounter by leaving my office, slamming the door definitively behind her.
What I told Elizabeth -- who is now two years out from her initial diagnosis (infiltrating ductal carcinoma of the breast, stage II, eight of 16 lymph nodes positive), still going strong and beginning to write her own poetry about her illness -- is that creative self-expression has been an important part of healing since the beginning of recorded human history. This ancient truth is being validated today, with the publication this year of a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that showed patients who wrote about their chronic illnesses suffered fewer symptoms and less disability. Patients stricken with asthma or debilitating rheumatoid arthritis actually improved over the course of months just by writing imaginatively about stressful experiences.
In a glitzy, high-powered medical establishment that often fails to meet many of the basic human needs of our patients, such results have created quite a stir. Soul-numbing managed care and mind-boggling technological advancement seem to have conspired to distance doctors from patients. The addition of an increasingly aged and multicultural society creates chasms so wide they threaten to swallow us all. It makes one wonder how anyone can make sense of the experience of illness.
It's not all that surprising that poetry -- whose soothing rhythms have their origins in our physical bodies, in the ebb and flow of our breathing or sobbing, in the very beating of our hearts -- can be so effective in restoring empathy and thus kindling the healing process. In many Native American cultures, incantation and voice were the principal therapeutic instruments. Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca lived for many years among the Capoque people, and recounted the dramatic cures effected by their use of performative language. (A few examples of Native American healing rituals, such as the Iroquois "condolence ritual" and the Navajo "night chant," have survived, and are being studied today.) Ancient Greek theology recognized the potent and inextricable interrelationship between poetry and healing in its most revered deity Apollo, who governed both; Apollo's symbols are the poet's lyre and the healer's staff.
Even the Judeo-Christian tradition explicitly links poetry and healing. Biblical poetry such as Psalms and the Song of Solomon make frequent reference to physical afflictions that God assuages. Christ himself restores sight, and even life, with divinely fluent pronouncements. Today's faith healers and Christian Scientists continue to rely solely on prayer for the treatment of illness.
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