‘Poetry Allows Us to Speak the Unspeakable’.
As a physician whose career began in the early 1990’s during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the US, Rafael Campo witnessed the pain and suffering of patient after patient fighting for their lives during a rapidly spreading health crisis.
Amid his own wrenching emotions, Campo found solace—for both himself and his patients—in poetry.
Today, as a primary-care physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, professor at Harvard Medical School, and award-winning poet, Campo continues to blend the two seemingly disparate professions. He often shares his poetry with his students and incorporates it as a “prescription” for willing patients.
“There are so many barriers to connecting with patients in a clinical setting, that sometimes the written word is equally, if not more, important in terms of making those connections,” Campo says.
On Wednesday, September 4, Campo will visit the School of Public Health for the SPH Reads: Diversity & Inclusion Seminar, where he will discuss his 1997 memoir The Desire to Heal: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry. The memoir, which is a collection of essays that explore Campo’s Cuban-American identity and his coming to terms as a gay man and physician during the HIV/AIDS crisis, is the 2019 selection for the school-wide reading program SPH Reads. SPH’s Queer Alliance participated in the nomination process during the spring 2019 semester.
“We looked for stories that touched on themes of intersectionality and that explored how health realities for queer and trans folks are often shaped by race, class, and other identity markers,” says Dielle Lundberg, (SPH’19) alum and research fellow in the Department of Global Health, who served on the Queer Alliance’s 2018-2019 executive board. “Not only does Campo’s work touch on these themes and more, it tells an important story about the role of art in healing that is relevant to so much of what we as a public health community seek to be a part of.”
Ahead of the seminar, Campo spoke about the importance of empathy in medicine and how poetry helped him come to terms with his identity, sexuality, and faith.
The need for empathy is one of the core themes in The Desire to Heal. Do you think this lack of empathy still exists today, and how can we benefit as a more empathetic society?
Empathy is essential in the work of healers—even more so in our current moment, when we are seeing a profound lack of empathy in so many different ways, and a lack of ability to see the world through another person’s eyes. Perhaps some of this is related to the increasing diversity of our society.
What I think is challenging about empathy is that it works well when we see that person as someone like ourselves—when it involves someone from the same social group, race, or spiritual background. But there is so much complexity now in our society and culture, and it makes connecting that much more difficult.
The good news is that we can go from that basic emotional empathy, that almost automatic connection with someone we identify as us, to cognitive empathy, which takes more work and effort. Not only do we live in a more racially, ethnically, and spiritually diverse country, we are also experiencing more differences in wealth and power. All of these factors pose a kind of challenge to empathy, but we can build on our natural empathetic resources to respond to these kinds of differences through writing and reading, and the arts and literature. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been so drawn to poetry.
How did writing help shape your interactions and approach with patients during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic?
After three years of medical school, I took a year off and studied poetry and poetics at BU. Rediscovering poetry unlocked a lot of suppressed stories and narratives that I had been hearing from my patients, as well as my own stories and identities that I had effectively covered up with my white coat. Poetry helped me make sense of the anguish I was seeing in clinics and hospital wards, especially during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic when we didn’t have much in terms of biomedical treatment to offer our patients at that time.
So I think that helplessness, which frustrated our sense of our power as doctors who could cure, led us to an upsetting and almost cruel distancing in relation to people living with HIV and AIDS.
I remember going to Gay Pride parades; as a latent poet and aspiring doctor, these demonstrations were a powerful rebuttal to the silencing and distancing from the suffering of whole communities who were dying from lack of treatment. Not only did those stories inspire care and compassion toward our patients, they also had a practical impact on the care that we provided. That outspoken activism spurred scientific discoveries that led to treatments that I prescribe now for people with HIV.
How do you incorporate poetry into your medical treatments for patients?
It’s so empowering and valuable for patients to encounter stories and narratives about their illnesses. Illnesses can be isolating, and a shared story can join us together and create a sense of community. When I share a story with a patient or invite patients to write about their experiences, I understand in a more humane way what someone is going through, and it really deepens my relationship with them.
Patients want to be heard and seen as who they are. Data is important in diagnosis and treatment, but our patients are so much more than numbers. When we see patients through their experiences of the diseases, it heightens our ability to intervene and improves health outcomes.
You also reflect upon feeling excluded from the Catholic Church. Did poetry help you reconcile your faith and sexuality? What words of advice would you provide to anyone who may be experiencing a similar struggle?
Through writing poetry about my identity as a gay man and as a person of faith, and how those two identities merged, it was critically important for me to be able to articulate something around which there was so much silence in the church in which I was raised.
I felt unaccepted in many ways within my own church. Poetry helped me juxtapose those elements of myself and clarify how I could be of service and true to both of my identities—as a person of faith who was motivated to care for others and ease suffering, and as a gay man who was part of a community that was being decimated and subjected to so much hatred and marginalization and homophobia. That creative space did allow me to join those two aspects of who I am, and I continue to do that. In an important way, speaking these truths through poetry helped me to heal myself.
As far as advice to others, I would say that writing about what one is experiencing is one pathway through these kinds of challenges. Poetry allows us to say what can’t be said, to speak the unspeakable, to refuse to be silenced. It’s a way to connect to others through our shared capacity for voice, and it helped me represent my authentic, equally human experience to people who might have judged or stereotyped me.
You make a distinction between healing and curing—can you describe this further?
In medicine, there are wonderful things that we can do that cure disease and hopefully alleviate a person’s suffering, but there are many instances where we reach the limit of what we can do with science and technology. But what we can always offer our patients is healing. Healing is ultimately about bearing witness to pain and suffering, providing comfort, and enacting empathy. That’s why we turn to the great works of art and literature and music, to help us make sense of what we can’t fully explicate by science. We can always join in their experiences through a shared story. We may not actually cure the disease, but what we do when we heal is in some ways much greater.