num_pages: 272
description: "Campo's gift is being able to describe the evolution of his manhood... fearlessly and with breathtaking honesty. He is truly a doctor of the soul."―Abraham Verghese "Rafael Campo is that rare and exotic hybrid," raved the Boston Globe , "a doctor-poet, with a sensualist point of view that leads him to explore... the eroticism of healing-the laying on of hands." In this "unrelenting effort to humanize the medical profession" ( Publishers Weekly ), Campo turns the doctor-patient relationship inside out, writing not just of his attempts to heal, but of how his patients have healed him. He writes of campy Aurora, "dying of love"; the elderly woman telling of her trip to the country to pick "big-as-your-hands" peaches; a hateful addict he wished would die; and Gary, whom he feared to love, "contentious and gossipy and irreverent." Campo's work, "reminiscent of Chekhov... [in] the way language comes up out of the body" ( Los Angeles Times ), restores "the transcendent power of language to redeem" as, throughout the book, "the narrative, and the narrator, only get more luscious" ( Out ).
language: English
title: The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry
titlecomplete: The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry
genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Memoir, Nonfiction, Health, Medical
ratings_count: 118
awards: awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Lambda Literary Award
category: Gay Men's Biography/Autobiography
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company