About the two physician-poets

Both of the physician-poets represented here began putting their thoughts into verse as teenagers, more than 35 years ago. Now, in their fifties, they find poetry rewarding and absorbing—so much so that they do most of their writing mentally rather than on paper.

"I write poetry all the time," says Dr. Jonathan Ross, the author of the poem here. "Most of it is in my mind, but I have managed over the years to write down some of it."

And Dr. Rob Foote, the author of the poem on these two pages, says that "at any given time I am usually at work on two or three poems. Because I write slowly, I have poems in progress memorized, so this allows me to work on them anytime I have a few minutes of free thought."

Ross, an associate professor of medicine at Dartmouth, has been on the faculty since 1983; he wrote an essay on generalist care for the Spring 2005 issue of Dartmouth Medicine—a piece that is still drawing comment in our "Letters" section (see here). He is also director of the Department of Medicine's weekly Morbidity and Mortality conference—the subject of the cover feature in our Summer 2003 issue. Foote, an alumnus of DHMC's internal medicine residency program, spent many years as director of outpatient and emergency services at New London, N.H., Hospital and since 1995 has been an assistant professor of cardiology at DHMC. His poetry has been published several times previously in these pages (as well as in a number of literary journals and the Annals of Internal Medicine); his research into a possible new biomarker for heart disease was the subject of a story in the "Discoveries" section of our Fall 2005 issue.

"I like poetry because of its capacity to convey so much in spare language," explains Ross. "Poetry is ageless . . . it is just there, waiting patiently to emerge, if I stop long enough to listen." This particular poem, likening the moment when a physician enters an exam room to the act of opening a new book, was not triggered by any particular patient, he says. "Every day there are moments that could trigger a poem—a name on my schedule list, a glance, a thought, a laboratory value, an x-ray. The great poets capture these moments, but we all have them."

For Foote, poetry "helps me understand my experiences of the world. It is a way of giving them context and searching for their meaning and significance." Foote's poem—which uses combat as an analogy for the intensity of emergency medicine—" is a summary of many years of experiences in the emergency department," he explains. "After a time, I think one begins to see the universal in the particular. It is an effort to express and understand both the experiences themselves and their cumulative effect."

Although the two poems here are very much about medicine, both Ross and Foote say they write more often about nonmedical subjects: "relationships, feelings, love, hate, hope, beauty, death—the stuff of humanity," as Ross puts it. But, notes Foote, medicine "is often a portal to elemental aspects of life."

Yet both feel that—whatever the subject—writing poetry, and reading it, have had an impact on their work as physicians. "I hope they make me a better observer of the less obvious aspects of my encounters with patients and with illness," says Foote, "and that they make me a more sensitive person." Interestingly, Ross uses almost the same words: "Poetry opens me to my feelings," he says, "and to those of others . . . and increases my sensitivity to others' pain and expectations.

"We live our personal lives sometimes completely hidden from others, even ourselves," Ross observes. "Our culture fosters this by emphasizing the roles we play, not the people we are." So here, unhidden, are two of the people behind the roles that make medicine at Dartmouth what it is.

Dana Cook Grossman