Mass. A graduate of Harvard Medical School and an internal medicine residency at the University of California San Francisco, Dr Campo now teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He has published several books of poetry and prose, and his latest collection of poetry, Diva , will be published in October 1999.
Writing can also be a very powerful modality for people living with illness.
For people who may in some way feel betrayed by their own bodies, authoring their own experiences can reestablish an important sense of control, particularly for patients who have terminal diagnoses, as there is the feeling that what they write will somehow live on after they are gone. You have commented that it was harder to come out to your medical colleagues as a poet than as a gay man. We are more than the diseases that affect us. But these comments are very dismissive of the real importance of nurturing empathy and nurturing the ability to open one's heart to a person in pain. Literature shouldn't supplant the existing curriculum but complement it, to help deepen the learning experience.